Almost completely disagree. Slightly more expensive, but significant better on a per-prompt basis? For non-trivial projects, the former is a small linear increase, the latter is a (somewhat-)exponential(-ish) cost/time/sanity savings.
I found 4.6 more amenable than 4.8 to style directions, we'll see how 5.0 does. Super-small-sample-size: I think part of its "Claude-ism" style comes from its propensity to try and "proactively" move the conversation/work along. Not sure how this would fare in non-obviously-productive environments, I'd guess "it's still annoying" considering your evidence.
I'm also thinking of another benchmark: (quantified) stylistic range across different prompts. Just putting it out there if anyone wants to do the work for me :D
Several other commenters have disparaging the design seemingly mostly due to its AI-generated nature, or maybe they actually do dislike cyberpunk.
Personally, I think being able to have these design languages be easily prototypable is fucking awesome. Great tests! (But a tad low-performance/janky, somehow). Though, I also like the cyberpunk aesthetic. Very on-brand(?) that AI generates it, hah.
How bad is it for you? Are you on ultra or xhigh/max? I typically ask it (5.5, now 5.6-sol) to use subagents for specific things anyway. On the Pro 20x plan, I'm seeing like ~1% usage per 20-30 min per session (on max effort), which is in line with 5.5.
Currently trying out ultra on a personal project, feels like ~3x more expensive per unit time. (No idea on quality yet, for obvious reasons.)
I find it interesting that no one here has mentioned the increased (usable) context window 258k -> 353k. That's huge, but I wonder if it means we pay long context (2x) for the ones past 272k still.
(Based off 2-3 month-old recollection, take with a grain of salt)
I had wanted to use it for my agent "network". A2A didn't fit the use case of "trusted agent, and was bloated due to "what if rogue actor". Of course, I could have used it, with all of its roughness, but chose to just vibe my own (before Claude Teams, though I haven't really used that, I think). In the process of creating a server to handle this (I already set up a Scala webserver to administrate/orchestrate hooks). Would love to hear others' suggestions for this.
Not saying you're doing this specifically, but I'd be careful with thinking that "company" in China means the same as "company" in America (or in the West more generally).
Love this. I've shifted in the past few months to using highly expressive types in Scala 3 to have types carry more and more compile-time proofs (without macros, though a couple are warranted).
Not only does it help with agentic test "sprawl", it seems to prevent agents from falling into lower-quality modes of operation. One of the more annoying things I've been preventing is what I call "noun accretion", where agents try and make a new monomorphic type for everything, instead of clearly genericizing when sensible.
My bet is on formal-method-shaped tooling (including languages with strong type systems) to accelerate decent-quality agentic coding.
When I say "highly expressive types", I mean techniques I'd likely not want to ship in a typical codebase, unless the team was already on the typelevel programming bandwagon (i.e. having HKT and type functions being basic blocks already, not weird). Agents are better at "math" than basically most devs (even category-theory-pilled ones), at least in terms of knowledge. Better yet, they are decent at pedagogy, especially when considering they have "infinite" patience for dialogue.
In a more personal setting, I've had Codex Lean-ify a couple of my hobby proofs, it was extremely easy. Note: not saying it did this 100% "correctly" (gotta learn more Lean 4 to check more thoroughly), but it also seems to check for classic proof gotchas by default.
Very excited for the future of formal methods.
Minor note, 2x $/tok is not 2x cost. Personally, I see Fable being significantly more token-efficient than Opus 4.8. Then, there's also the compounding costs of quality.
How else would you write this (marketing copy) exactly? "Its output matches better to its CoT which matches to better to our hidden state decoder according to <insert measure here>; see <insert paper ref>"?
Awesome, thanks for posting because I think I hit a possibly-spurious bug in turning Adaptive off when I switched models (4.6 -> 4.8, extra). Tried again, works as intended (I hope).
More importantly for me, though, is how CC will respond to 4.6-"only" flags for thinking. For now, it doesn't seem to clobber my setup.
Let's hope I don't have to disable it after a day like with 4.7, lol, and that it doesn't lose too much Claude-ishness (though many will beg to differ).
Yes, but that's also a specific luxury I can choose for myself. Definitely a fun and interesting question. At some level of reliance, people would answer "no", but there's the large middle ground (assuming similarly-frontier models are down): having a weaker(?) AI model help you get up to speed ASAP by summarizing code pedagogically, and linearizing the code read order. Basically like an AI-assisted (but manual) code review to reorient yourself.