Thread

Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code

232 points · 156 comments · saikatsg

rdli · 1791060574 · focus · HN ↗
It’s a really good model. Over the past few days, I give Opus some general directives to basically speed up our CI, and telling it I care both about billing minutes and wall clock time. I told it to create a plan after analyzing everything in our CI, run the plan by a Fable subagent, and then focus on low-risk, high-reward changes.
9 hours later, I had 12 PRs ready to be merged, and the net result is CI time has dropped from ~10 minutes to ~4 minutes, and billing minutes have dropped around 60%. Less than an hour of my attention.
1. Waterluvian · 1791064255 · focus · HN ↗
  Every time weird stuff happened this week it was because the model choice in VSCode got set back to “auto” and some other model was trying its best. 5.5 is what I just set it to. Even Fable feels worse for my use cases.
  1. AnotherGoodName · 1791065488 · focus · HN ↗
    Even Anthropic rates Fable lower than 5.5 on pretty much all benchmarks.
    "Why does Fable even exist" is a very very reasonable question right now.
    satvikpendem · 1791066593 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a class of model not a static one. There'll be Fable 5.5 that's even better than Opus 5.5.
    Wowfunhappy · 1791069378 · focus · HN ↗
    Although we never had a Claude Opus 5.1. Fable went 5 → 5.1 and Opus went 5 → 5.5.
    satvikpendem · 1791073669 · focus · HN ↗
    Opus 5.5 is probably a distilled version of a 6 model.
    Wowfunhappy · 1791078441 · focus · HN ↗
    If they had 6, don't you think they'd be serving it? Even if it was too expensive for most users, some big companies would likely be interested.
    K0balt · 1791093848 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re assuming the goal of the big AI companies is to serve models for money. That is not the goal. They have a lot of incentives not to share their best models.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.