Claude Opus 4.1

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-1

by meetpateltech • 12 months ago

841 328 12 months ago

anthropic.com

jasonlernerman• 12 months ago

Has anyone tested it yet? How's it acting?

smerrill25• 12 months ago

waiting for this, too.

usaar333• 12 months ago

No obvious gains I feel from quick chats, but too early to tell.

These benchmark gains aren't that high, so I doubt it is that obvious.

jedisct12• 12 months ago

Tested it on a refactor of Zig code. It worked fine, but was very slow.

minimaxir• 12 months ago

This likely won't move the needle for Opus use over Sonnet while the cost remains the same. Using OpenRouter rankings (https://openrouter.ai/rankings) as a proxy, Sonnet 3.7 and Sonnet 4 combined generates 17x more tokens than Opus 4.

qsort• 12 months ago

All three major labs released something within hours of each other. This anime arc is insane.

x187463• 12 months ago

Given the GPT5 rumors, August is just getting started.

kridsdale3• 12 months ago

Given the Gregorian Calendar and the planet's path through its orbit, August is just getting started.

teaearlgraycold• 12 months ago

I'm all buckled up and ready for what's effectively GPT 4.6

ozgung• 12 months ago

What a time to be alive

tonyhart7• 12 months ago

as if they wait competitor first then launch it at the same time to make market decide which one is best

torginus• 12 months ago

I think this means that GPT5 is better - you can't launch a worse model after the competitor supersedes you - you have to show that you're in the lead even if its just for a day.

vFunct• 12 months ago

None of them seem to have published any papers associated with them on how these new models advanced the state-of-the-art though. =^(

hugodan• 12 months ago

china will do that for them

candiddevmike• 12 months ago

It's definitely a coincidence

wilg• 12 months ago

It's not a coincidence or a cartel, it's PR counterprogramming.

subarctic• 12 months ago

But is it just a coincidence

Etheryte• 12 months ago

This is why you have PR departments. Being on top of the HN front page, news sites, etc matters a lot. Even if you can't be the first, it's important to dilute the attention as much as possible to reduce the limelight your competitors get.

paulryanrogers• 12 months ago

"Prep the next three point releases now, but don't release any until I say so. None needs to be noticably better or even different, just has to have a higher number." -CEO of AI companies

andai• 12 months ago

How do they know when it's time? Corporate espionage? Or do they just have Next Thing queued up months in advance and ready to go.

j457• 12 months ago

They likely sit on releases ready to go.

qoez• 12 months ago

There's so many leakers in every lab

goatlover• 12 months ago

If only there were more leakers in the FBI or DOJ.

PeterStuer• 12 months ago

Eu auto brands colluded for years to synchronize new tech into their model lines. Could it be the AI SaaS sector is showing its first steps towards "maturity"? /s

steveklabnik• 12 months ago

This is the bit I'm most interested in:

We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks.

machiaweliczny• 12 months ago

This is so people don't immediately migrate for GPT5

NitpickLawyer2• 12 months ago

Cheekily announcing during oAI's oss model launch :D

haaz• 12 months ago

it is barely an improvement according to their own benchmarks. not saying thats a bad thing, but not enough for anybody to notice any difference

waynenilsen• 12 months ago

i think its probably mostly vibes but that still counts, this is not in the charts

Windsurf reports Opus 4.1 delivers a one standard deviation improvement over Opus 4 on their junior developer benchmark, showing roughly the same performance leap as the jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4.

esafak3• 12 months ago

That is a big improvement.

ttoinou• 12 months ago

That's why they named it 4.1 and not 4.5

zamadatix3• 12 months ago

When it's "that's why they incremented the version by a tenth instead of a half" you know things have really started to slow for the large models.

leetharris• 12 months ago

Good! I'm glad they are just giving us small updates. Opus 4 just came out, if you have small improvements, why not just release them? There's no downside for us.

AstroBen4• 12 months ago

I don't think this could even be called an improvement? It's small enough that it could just be random chance

j_bum• 12 months ago

I’ve always wondered about this actually. My assumption is that they always “pick the best” result from these tests.

Instead, ideally they’d run the benchmark tests many times, and share all of the results so we could make statistical determinations.

gloosx• 12 months ago

They need to leave some room to release 10 more models. They could crank benchmarks to 100% but then no new model is needed lol? Pretty sure these pretty benchmark graphs are all completely staged marketing numbers since they do solve the same problems they are being trained on – no novel or unknown problematic is presented to them.

levocardia• 12 months ago

"You pay $20/mo for X, and now I'm giving you 1.05*X for the same price." Outrageous!

onlyrealcuzzo2• 12 months ago

I will only add that it's interesting that in the results graphic, they simply highlighted Opus 4.1 - choosing not to display which models have the best scores - as Opus 4.1 only scored the best on about half of the benchmarks - and was worse than Opus 4.0 on at least one measure.

Topfi• 12 months ago

I am still very early, but output quality wise, yes, there does not seem to be any noticeable improvement in my limited personal testing suite. What I have noticed though is subjectively better adherence to instructions and documentation provided outside the main prompt, though I have no way to quantify or reliably test that yet. So beyond reliably finding Needles-in-the-Haystack (which Frontier models have done well on lately), Opus 4.1 seems to do better in following those needles even if not explicitly guided to compared to Opus 4.

jzig2• 12 months ago

I'm confused by how Opus is presented to be superior in nearly every way for coding purposes yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better. Has anyone switched to entirely using Opus from Sonnet? Or maybe switching to Opus for certain things while using Sonnet for others?

datameta2• 12 months ago

I now eagerly await Sonnet 4.1, only because of this release.

rtfeldman• 12 months ago

Yes, Opus is very noticeably better at programming in both Rust and Zig in my experience. I wish it were cheaper!

MostlyStable• 12 months ago

Opus seems better to me on long tasks that require iterative problem solving and keeping track of the context of what we have already tried. I usually switch to it for any kind of complicated troubleshooting etc.

I stick with Sonnet for most things because it's generally good enough and I hit my token limits with it far less often.

unshavedyak• 12 months ago

Same. I'm on the $200 plan and I find Opus "better", but Sonnet is more straight forward. Sonnet is, to me, a "don't let it think" model. It does great if you give it concrete and small goals. Anything vague or broad and it starts thinking and it's a problem.

Opus gives you a bit more rope to hang yourself with imo. Yes, it "thinks" slightly better, but still not good enough to me. But it can be good enough to convince you that it can do the job.. so i dunno, i almost dislike it in this regard. I find Sonnet just easier to predict in this regard.

Could i use Opus like i do Sonnet? Yes definitely, and generally i do. But then i don't really see much difference since i'm hand-holding so much.

adastra224• 12 months ago

Every time that Sonnet is acting like it has brain damage (which is once or twice a day), I switch to Opus and it seems to sort things out pretty fast. This is unscientific anicdata though, and it could just be that switching models (any model) would have worked.

anonzzzies• 12 months ago

Exactly that.

j457• 12 months ago

They both seem to behave differently depending on how loaded the system seems to be.

monatron• 12 months ago

This is a great use case for sub-agents IMO. By default, sub-agents use sonnet. You can have opus orchestrate the various agents and get (close to) the best of both worlds.

gpm2• 12 months ago

This seems like a case of reversion to the mean. When one model is performing below average, changing anything (like switching to another model) is likely to improve it by random chance...

HarHarVeryFunny• 12 months ago

Maybe context rot? If model's output seems to be getting worse or in a rut, then try just clearing context / starting a new session.

aghilmort• 12 months ago

switching models great best practice whether get stuck or not

can look at primal check the mean or dual get out of local minima

in all cases, model, tokenizer, etc is just enough different that will generally pay off in spaces quickly

dested• 12 months ago

If I'm using cursor then sonnet is better, but in claude code Opus 4 is at least 3x better than Sonnet. As with most things these days, I think a lot of it comes down to prompting.

jzig2• 12 months ago

This is interesting. I do use Cursor with almost exclusively Sonnet and thinking mode turned on. I wonder if what Cursor does under the hood (like their indexing) somehow empowers Sonnet more. I do not have much experience with using Claude Code.

seunosewa• 12 months ago

It's ridiculously overpriced in the API. Just like o3 used to be.

brenoRibeiro706• 12 months ago

I feel the same way. I usually use Opus to help with coding and documentation, and I use Sonnet for emails and so on.

biinjo• 12 months ago

Im on the Max plan and generally Opus seems to do better work than Sonnet. However, that’s only when they allow me to use Opus. The usage limits, even on the max plan, are a joke. Yesterday I hit the limits within MINUTES of starting my work day.

epolanski2• 12 months ago

Yeah, you need to actively cherry pick which model to use in order to not waste tokens on stuff that would be easily handed by a simpler model.

furyofantares4• 12 months ago

I'm a bit confused by people hitting usage limits so quickly.

I use Opus exclusively and don't hit limits. ccusage reports I'm using the API-equivalent of $2000/mo

dsrtslnd23• 12 months ago

same here constantly hit the Opus limits after minutes on Max plan

Aeolun5• 12 months ago

Is this on x5? Because ever since they booted all the freeloaders I’ve not once seen the “you are approaching usage limits” message. Anyway, the “you are approaching usage limits” message shows up when you are over 50% of your tokens for that timeframe, so it’s not sure useful.

gpm2• 12 months ago

I notice that on the "Agentic Coding" benchmark cited in the article Sonnet 4 outperformed Opus 4 (by 0.2%), and under performs Opus 4.1 (by -1.8%).

So this release might change that consensus? If you believe the benchmarks are reflective of reality anyways.

jimbo8082• 12 months ago

If you believe the benchmarks are reflective of reality anyways.

That's a big "if." But yeah, I can't tell a difference subjectively between Opus and Sonnet, other than maybe a sort of placebo effect. I'm more careful to write quality prompts when using Opus, because I don't want to waste the 5x more expensive tokens.

Uehreka• 12 months ago

yet the general consensus and my own experience seem to be that Sonnet is much much better

Given that there’s nothing close to scientific analysis going on, I find it hard to tell how big the “Sonnet is overall better, not just sometimes” crowd is. I think part of the problem is that “The bigger model is better” feels obvious to say, so why say it? Whereas “the smaller model is better actually” feels both like unobvious advice and also the kind of thing that feels smart to say, both of which would lead to more people who believe it saying it, possibly creating the illusion of consensus.

I was trying to dig into this yesterday, but every time I come across a new thread the things people are saying and the proportions saying what are different.

I suppose one useful takeaway is this: If you’re using Claude Max and get downgraded from Opus to Sonnet for a few hours, you don’t have to worry too much about it being a harsh downgrade in quality.

taormina3• 12 months ago

Just more ancedata, but I entirely agree. I can't say that I am happy with Sonnet's output at any point, really, but it still occasionally works, whereas Opus has been a dumpster fire every single time.

SkyPuncher3• 12 months ago

I don't doubt Opus is technically superior, but it's not practically superior for me.

It's still pretty much impossible to have any LLM one-shot a complex implementation. There's just too many details to figure out and too much to explain for it to get correct. Often, there's uncertainty and ambiguity that I only understand the correct answer (or rather less bad answer) after I've spent time deep in the code. Having Opus spit out a possibly correct solution just isn't useful to me. I need to understand _why_ we got to that solution and _why_ it's a correct solution for the context I'm working in.

For me, this means that I largely have an iteratively driven implementation approach where any particular task just isn't that complex. Therefore, Sonnet is completely sufficient for my day-to-day needs.

ssk42• 12 months ago

You can also always have it create design docs and mermaid diagrams for each task. Outline the why much easier earlier, shifting left

bdamm• 12 months ago

I've been having a great time with Windsurf's "Planning" feature. Have a nice discussion with Cascade (Claude) all about what it is that neerds to happen - sometimes a very long conversation including test code. Then when everything is very clear, make it happen. Then test and debug the results with all that context. Pretty nice.

jm4• 12 months ago

I use both. Sonnet is faster and more cost efficient. It's great for coding. Where Opus is noticeably better is in analysis. It surpasses Sonnet for debugging, finding patterns in data, creativity and analysis in general. It doesn't make a lot of sense to use Opus exclusively unless you're on a max20 plan and not hitting limits. Using Opus for design and troubleshooting and Sonnet for everything else is a good way to go.

astrostl• 12 months ago

With aggressive Claude Code use I didn't find Sonnet better than Opus but I did find it faster while consuming far fewer tokens. Once I switched to the $100 Max plan and configured CC to exclusively use Sonnet I haven't run into a plan token limit even once. When I saw this announcement my first thing was to CMD-F and see when Sonnet 4.1 was coming out, because I don't really care about Opus outside of interactive deep research usage.

ssss11• 12 months ago

That’s very strange. Sonnet is hot garbage and Opus is a miracle, for me. I also don’t see anyone praising sonnet anywhere.

sky2224• 12 months ago

I've found with limited context provided in your prompt, opus is just awful compared to even gpt-4.1, but once I give it even just a little bit more of an explanation, it jumps leagues ahead.

sothatsit• 12 months ago

Opus really shines for completing long-running tasks with no supervision. But if you are using Claude Code interactively and actively steering it yourself, Sonnet is good enough and is faster.

I don't believe anyone saying Sonnet yields better results than Opus though, as my experience has been exactly the opposite. But trade-off wise, I can definitely see it being a better experience when used interactively because of its speed and lower cost.

Aeolun5• 12 months ago

My opinion of Opus is that it takes the correct action 19/20 times, where Sonnet takes the correct action 18/20 times. It’s not strictly necessary to use Opus, but if you have the subscription already it’s just a pure win.

chisleu• 12 months ago

I use opus or gemini 2.5 pro for plan mode and sonnet for act mode in Cline. https://cline.bot

It's my experience that Opus is better at solving architectural challenges where sonnet struggles.

tkz1312• 12 months ago

100% opus all the time. Sonnet seems to get confused much faster and need more hand holding in my experience.

cmrdporcupine• 12 months ago

Strategy I'm playing with, we'll see how good of results I get, is to prompt Opus to analyze and plan but not implement.

E.g. prompt to read a paper, read some source, then write out a terse document meant to be read by machine not human.

Then switch to Sonnet, have it read that document, and do the actual implementation work.

j457• 12 months ago

Opus is superior to understand the big picture and the direction.

Sonnet is great at banging it out.

paxys• 12 months ago

Why is everything releasing today?

datameta2• 12 months ago

Could it be nobody wanted to be first and overshadowed, nor the only one left out - and it cascaded after the first announcement? My first hunch, though, was that it had been agreed upon. Game theory I think tells us that releasing same day in the pattern ABC BCA CAB etc would be lowest risk and highest average gain?

highfrequency• 12 months ago

If they release before GPT-5, they don't have to compare to GPT-5 in their benchmarks. It's a big PR win to be able to plausibly claim that your model is the best coding model at the time of release.

gusmally• 12 months ago

They restarted Claude Plays Pokemon with the new model: https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon

(He had been stuck in the Team Rocket hideout (I believe) for weeks)

Lionga• 12 months ago

The finest of AI, probably using electricity/water for 100s of homes can not even beat a very simple children game with millions of texts guides etc. about it.

When can we replace doctors with it?

alrocar• 12 months ago

just ran the LLM to SQL benchmark over opus-4.1 and it didn't top previous version :thinking: => https://llm-benchmark.tinybird.live/

epolanski2• 12 months ago

How does running it multiple times performs?

LLMs are non-deterministic, I think benchmarks should be more about averages of N runs, rather than single shot experiments.

jedisct12• 12 months ago

Is it just me or is it super slow?

taormina3• 12 months ago

Alright, well, Opus 4.1 seems exactly as useless as Opus 4 was, but it's probably eating my tokens faster. Wish they let you tell somehow.

At least Sonnet 4 is still usable, but I'll be honest, it's been producing worse and worse slob all day.

I've basically wasted the morning on Claude Code when I should've just been doing it all myself.

AlecSchueler8• 12 months ago

I've also noticed Sonnet starting to degrade. It's developing some of the behaviours that put me off the competition in the first place. Needless explanations, filler in responses, wanting to put everything in lists, even increased sycophancy.

ACCount36• 12 months ago

Major AI companies are not doing nearly enough to address the sycophancy problem.

I get that it's not an easy problem to solve, but how is Anthropic supposed to solve the actual alignment problem if they can't even stop their production LLMs from glazing the user all the time? And OpenAI is somehow even worse.

bavell2• 12 months ago

I've basically wasted the morning on Claude Code when I should've just been doing it all myself.

Welcome to the machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBvAxSx0nAM&t=45s

Aeolun5• 12 months ago

I feel like this is just related to my projects getting bigger. Claude Code is trying to keep up with my project evolving from 2k lines of code to 100k lines. Of course it’s going to feel worse.

taormina3• 12 months ago

My project is basically the same size as when I started using it.

satyrun• 12 months ago

I think it is how our expectations of the latest model change over time.

I expect to be completely blown away by GPT-5 in the first few days and then over time I will figure out the limitations of the model. Then I will be less impressed because you don't know what it can't do at first.

UncleEntity4• 12 months ago

Other than it starting out trying to produce a full and complete web app (or whatever) for my daily yak shaving session instead of the normal "let's talk about and work through this thing" the new Opus 4.1 seems to 'get it' a lot quicker than the old daffy robot did. It asked pertinent questions to understand the system we are working on and accomplished the goal of updating the design document so I don't have to keep explaining details at the start of every chat session. Something, by the way, it always previously failed to do causing me to have to explain stuff each and every time before forward progress could be made.

I do agree it did hit the token limit a lot quicker than before where I could chat for hours without worrying about it.

Either way, still have one last yak to shave for this project so we'll see how efficient it is with that. If it accomplishes the task before burning through all the tokens then win, win, I suppose.

rvz2• 12 months ago

Notice how Anthropic has never open sourced any of their models.

This makes them (Anthropic) worse than OpenAI in terms of openness.

Since in this case as we all know. [0]

"What will permanently change everything is open source and transparent AI models that are smaller and more powerful than GPT-3 or even GPT-4."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34865626

jjani• 12 months ago

On the other hand, they have always exposed their raw chain of thought, so you know exactly what you're paying for, unlike OpenAI who hides it. Similarly they allow an actual thinking budget rather than vague "low, medium, high", again unlike OpenAI. They also allow API access to all their models without draconic send-us-your-personal-data-KYC, once more unlikely OpenAI.

They might not fit your personal definition of "openness", but they do fit many other equally valid interpretations of that contept.

rvz2• 11 months ago

They better do it sooner then.

ryandrake9• 12 months ago

Am I the only one super confused about how to even get started trying out this stuff? Just so I wouldn't be "that critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes," I tried GitHub Copilot and was kind of not very impressed. Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose.

Let's see: we have Claude Code vs. Claude the API vs. Claude the website, and they're totally different from each other? One is command line, one integrates into your IDE (which IDE?) and one is just browser based, I guess. Then you have the different pricing plans, Free, Pro, and Max? But then there's also Claude Team and Claude Enterprise? These are monthly plans that only work with Claude the Website, but Claude Code is per-request? Or is it Claude API that's per-request? I have no idea. Then you have the models: Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet, with various version numbers for each?? Then there's Cline and Cursor and GOOD GRIEF! I just want to putz around with something in VSCode for a few hours!

adamors• 12 months ago

Download Cursor and try it through that, IMO that's currently the most polished experience especially since you can change models on the fly. For more advanced usecases, CLI is better but for getting your feet wet I think Cursor is the best choice.

ryandrake9• 12 months ago

Thanks. Too bad you need to switch editors to go that path. I assume the Cursor monthly plans are not the same as the Claude monthly plans and you can't use one for the other if you want to experiment...

olalonde• 12 months ago

Claude Code CLI.

ryandrake9• 12 months ago

Thanks. With the CLI, can you get Copilot-ish things like tab-completion and inline commands directly in your IDE? Or do you need to copy/paste to and from a terminal? It feels like running a command on the IDE and then copying the output into your IDE is a pretty primitive way to operate.

collinvandyck76• 12 months ago

Claude Code is the superior interface in my opinion. Definitely start there.

Filligree2• 12 months ago

You need Claude Pro or Max. The website subscription also allows you to use the command line tool—the rate limits are shared—and the command line tool includes IDE integration, at least for VSCode.

Claude Code is currently best-in-class, so no point in starting elsewhere, but you do need to read the documentation.

wahnfrieden2• 12 months ago

Correct. Claude Code Max with Opus. Don’t even bother with Sonnet.

47282847• 12 months ago

You need Claude Pro or Max.

Actually, to try it out, prepaid token billing is fine. You are not required to have a subscription for claude code cli. Even just $5 gave me enough breathing room to get a feeling for its potential, personally. I do not touch code often these days so I was relieved not to have to subscribe and cancel again just to play around a little and have it write some basic scripts for me.

vlade11115• 12 months ago

Claude Code has two usage modes: pay-per-token or subscription. Both modes are using API under the hood, but with subscription mode you are only paying a fixed amount a month. Each subscription tier has some undisclosed limits, cheaper plans have lower usage limits. So I would recommend paying $20 and trying the Claude Code via that subscription.

dennisy• 12 months ago

No Opus in the $20 tier though sadly

torben-friis• 12 months ago

I’m looking for cursor alternatives after confusing pricing changes. Is Claude code an option? Can be integrated on an editor/ide for similar results?

My use case so far is usually requesting mechanic work I would rather describe than write myself like certain test suites, and sometimes discovery on messy code bases.

prinny_• 12 months ago

What exactly did you try with GitHub copilot? It’s not an LLM itself, just in interface for an LLM. I have copilot in my professional GitHub account and I can choose between chat-gpt and Claude.

AlecSchueler8• 12 months ago

I'm not sure what's complicated about what you're describing? They offer two models and you can pay more for higher usage limits, then you can choose if you want to run it in your browser or in your terminal. Like what else would you expect?

Fwiw I have a Claude pro plan and have no interest in using other offerings so I'm not sure if they're super simple (one model, one interface, one pricing plan)?

onlyrealcuzzo2• 12 months ago

When people post this stuff, it's like, are you also confused that Nike sells shoes AND shorts AND shirts, and there's different colors and skus for each article of clothing, and sometimes they sell direct to consumer and other times to stores and to universities, and also there's sales and promotions, etc, etc?

It's almost as if companies sell more than one product.

Why is this the top comment on so many threads about tech products?

windsignaling• 12 months ago

On the contrary, I'm confused about why you're confused.

This is a well-known and documented phenomenon - the paradox of choice.

I've been working in machine learning and AI for nearly 20 years and the number of options out there is overwhelming.

I've found many of the tools out there do some things I want, but not others, so even finding the model or platform that does exactly what I want or does it the best is a time-consuming process.

joshmarlow• 12 months ago

VSCode has a pretty good Gemini integration - it can pull up a chat window from the side. I like to discuss design changes and small refactorings ("I added this new rpc call in my protobuf file, can you go ahead and stub out the parts of code I need to get this working in these 5 different places?") and it usually does a pretty darn good job of looking at surrounding idioms in each place and doing what I want. But gemini can be kind of slow here.

But I would recommend just starting using Claude in the browser, talk through an idea for a project you have and ask it to build it for you. Go ahead and have a brain storming session before you actually ask it to code - it'll help make sure the model has all of the context. Don't be afraid to overload it with requirements - it's generally pretty good at putting together a coherent plan. If the project is small/fits in a single file - say a one page web app or a complicated data schema + sql queries - then it can usually do a pretty good job in one place. Then just copy+paste the code and run it out of the browser.

This workflow works well for exploring and understanding new topics and technologies.

Cursor is nice because it's an AI integrated IDE (smoother than the VSCode experience above) where you can select which models to use. IMO it seems better at tracking project context than Gemini+VSCode.

Hope this helps!

spaceman_2020• 12 months ago

Download Claude Code

Create a new directory in your terminal

Open that directory, type in "Claude" to run Claude

Press Shit + Tab to go into planning mode

Tell Claude what you want to build - recommend something simple to start with. Specify the languages, environment, frameworks you want, etc.

Claude will come up with a plan. Modify the plan or break it into smaller chunks if necessary

Once plan is approved, ask it to start coding. It will ask you for permissions and give you the finished code

It really is something when you actually watch it go.

zarzavat2• 12 months ago

Github Copilot and Claude code are not exactly competitors.

Github Copilot is autocomplete, highly useful if you use VS Code, but if you are using e.g. Jetbrains then you have other options. Copilot comes with a bunch of other stuff that I rarely use.

Claude code is project-wide editing, from the CLI.

They complement each other well.

As far as I'm concerned the utility of the AI-focused editors has been diminished by the existence of Claude code, though not entirely made redundant.

fkyoureadthedoc• 12 months ago

Github Copilot is autocomplete... comes with a bunch of other stuff that I rarely use.

That bunch of other stuff includes the chat, and more recently "Agent Mode". I find it pretty useful, and the autocomplete near useless.

qingcharles4• 12 months ago

This isn't correct. GitHub Copilot now totally competes with Claude Code. You can have it create an entire app for you in "Agent" mode if you're feeling brave. In fact, seeing as Copilot is built directly into Visual Studio when you download it, I guess they have a one-up.

Copilot isn't locked to a specific LLM, though. You can select the model from a panel, but I don't think you can plug in your own right now, and the ones you can select might not be SOTA because of that.

tomwojcik• 12 months ago

Opencode https://github.com/sst/opencode provides a CC like interface for copilot. It's a slightly worse tool, but since copilot with Claude 4 is super cheap, I ended up preferring it over CC. Almost no limits, cheaper, you can use all the Copilot models, GH is not training on your data.

andsoitis• 12 months ago

use Claude. But I have no idea what the right way to do it is because there are so many paths to choose.

Anthropic has this useful quick start guide: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/quickstart

StephenHerlihyy• 12 months ago

Kilo Code for VSCode is pretty solid. Give it a try.

wintermutestwin• 12 months ago

Yes. You basically need an LLM to provide guidance on product selection in this brave new world.

It is actually one of my most useful use cases of this tech. Nice to have a way to ask in private so you don’t get snarky answers like: it’s just like buying shoes!

vanillax• 12 months ago

All the tools, copilot,claude, gemini in vscode are all completely worthless unless in Agent Mode. I have no idea why none of these tools dont default to Agent mode.

ActorNightly2• 12 months ago

If you want your own cheap IDE integration, you can set up VSCode with Continue extension, ollama running locally, and a small agent model. https://docs.continue.dev/features/agent/model-setup.

If you want to understand how all of this works, the best way is to build a coding agent manually. Its not that hard

1. Start with Ollama running locally and Gemma3 QAT models. https://ollama.com/library/gemma3

2. Write a wrapper around Ollama using your favorite language. The idea is that you want to be able to intercept responses coming back from the model.

3. Create a system prompt that tells the model things like "if the user is asking you to create a file, reply in this format:...". Generally to start, you can specify instructions for read file, write file, and execute file

4. In your wrapper, when you send the input chat prompt, and get the model response back, you look for those formats, and make the wrapper actually execute the action. For example if the model replies back with the format to read file, you read the file from your wrapper code and send it back to the model.

Every coding assistant is basically this under the hood with just a lot more fluff and their own IDE integration.

The benefit of doing your own is that you can customize it to your own needs, and when you direct a model with more precision even the small models perform very well with much faster speed.

afro88• 12 months ago

OP is asking for where to get started with Claude for coding. They're confused. They just want to mess around with it in VSCode. And you start talking about Ollama, PAT, coding your own wrapper, composing a system prompt etc.!?

jimbo8082• 12 months ago

You just described all of your options in detail - what's the problem? Pick one. Seems like you've got a very thorough grasp on how to get started trying the stuff out, but it requires you to choose how you want to do that.

kelnos4• 12 months ago

If you're looking for a coding assistant, get Claude Code, and give it a try. I think you need the Pro plan at a minimum for that ($20/mo; I don't think Free includes Claude Code). Don't do the per-request API pricing as it can get expensive even while just playing around.

Agree that the offering is a bit confusing and it's hard to know where to start.

Just FYI: Claude Code is a terminal-based app. You run it in the working directory of your project, and use your regular editor that you're used to, but of course that means there's no editor integration (unlike something like Cursor). I personally like it that way, but YMMV.

robluxus• 12 months ago

I just want to putz around with something in VSCode for a few hours!

I just googled "using claude from vscode" and the first page had a link that brought me to anthropic's step by step guide on how to set this up exactly.

Why care about pricing and product names and UI until it's a problem?

Someone on HN told me Copilot sucks, use Claude.

I concur, but I'm also just a dude saying some stuff on HN :)

zaphirplane• 12 months ago

try asking it ?

screye3• 12 months ago

Cursor + Claude 4 = best quality + UX balance. Pay up for 20/month subscription.

Cursor imports in your VSCode setup. Setting it up should be trivial.

Use Agent mode. Use it in a preexisting repo.

You're off the races.

There is a lot more you can do, but you should start seeing value at this point.

w0m• 12 months ago

honestly - copilot free mode; and just play with the agentic stuff can give you a good idea. Attach it to Roo and you'll get a good idea. Realize that if you paid to use a better model; you'd get better results as free doesn't have a ton of premium tokens.

lojack• 12 months ago

Lets see: We have GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise Server, and a GitHub API. Then there's the command line and a desktop version, and one that is just browser based I guess. Then you have different pricing plans, Free, Team, and Enterprise? How is Enterprise different than GitHub Enterprise Server? It's very easy to find evidence to confirm our bias.

Claude code is actually one of the most straightforward products I've used as far as onboarding goes. You download the tool, and follow the instructions. You can use one of the 3 plans, and everything else is automatic. You can figure out token usage and what models and versions to use and how to use MCP servers and all of that -- there's a lot of power -- but you don't need to do ANY of that to get started trying it out.

You're not being:

That critic who doesn't try the stuff he criticizes

You're being:

That critic who is trying to confirm their biases

ramesh31• 12 months ago

Will the price for 4 go down? I still find Opus completely unusable for the cost/performance, as someone who spends thousands per month on tokens. There's really no noticeable difference from Sonnet, at nearly 10x the price.

_vaporwave_• 12 months ago

It's interesting that Anthropic maintains current prices for prior state of the art models when doing a new release. Why offer a model with worse performance for the same price? What incentives are they trying to create?

dysoco• 12 months ago

I'm guessing it's mostly for legacy reasons. When 3.7 came out many people were not happy with it and went back to 3.5; I guess supporting older models for a while makes sense.

gwd• 12 months ago

What incentives are they trying to create?

One obvious explanation is that pricing is strongly related to the price to them, and that their only incentive is for people to use an expensive model of they really need it.

I forget which one of the GPT models was better, faster, and cheaper than the previous model. The incentive there is obviously, "If you want to use the old model for whatever reason, fine, but we really want you to use the new one because costs us less to run."

mrcwinn• 12 months ago

o3 and o3-pro are just so good. Sonnet goes off the deep end too often and Opus, in my experience, is not as strong at reasoning compared to OpenAI, despite the higher costs. Rarely do we see a worse, more expensive product win - but competition is good and I’m rooting for Anthropic nonetheless!

AlecSchueler8• 12 months ago

Off the deep end?

UncleEntity4• 12 months ago

Probably referring to it's tendency to over-complicate things to the point you have to step in and be like "WTF are you even talking about... Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to just use the original, well planned out design?"

Which it does a lot...

derwiki• 12 months ago

It picks a bad path forward and keeps doubling down on it

WXLCKNO• 12 months ago

o3 feels pretty good to me as well but o3-pro has consistently one shotted problems other LLMs got stuck on.

I'm talking multiple tries of claude 4 opus, Gemini 2.5 pro, o3 etc resulting in sometimes hundreds of lines of code.

Versus o3-pro (very slowly) analyzing and then fixing something that seemed completely unrelated in a one or two line change and truly fixing the root cause.

o3-pro level LLMs at reduced cost and increased speed will already be amazing..

bayesianbot2• 12 months ago

OpenAI also has Flex processing[1] for o3. I've spent most of my time with Gemini 2.5, but lately been trying out a ton of o3 as it seems to work quite well and I get really cheap tokens (~95% of my agentic tokens are cached which is 75% discount and flex mode adds 50% for $0.25 / million input tokens)

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/flex-processing?api-...

esafak3• 12 months ago

Which agents support flex mode?

thoop• 12 months ago

The article says "We plan to release substantially larger improvements to our models in the coming weeks."

Sonnet 4 has definitely been the best model for our product's use case, but I'd be interested in trying Haiku 4 (or 4.1?) just due to the cost savings.

I'm surprised Anthropic hasn't mentioned anything about Haiku 4 yet since they released the other models.

mocmoc• 12 months ago

Their limits are just … a real road blocker

bananapub2• 12 months ago

huh?

Claude Mad is tens of hours of opus a month, or you can pay per token and have unlimited.

Or did you mean “I wish it was cheaper”?

andyferris4• 12 months ago

Ha - the $200 plan should be renamed to "Claude Mad Max" :)

OldGreenYodaGPT• 12 months ago

Claude Code has honestly made me at least 10x more productive. I’ve burned through about 3 billion tokens and have been consistently merging 5+ PRs a day, tackling tons of tech debt, improving GitHub Actions, and making crazy progress on product work

totaa• 12 months ago

can you share your workflow?

steinvakt2• 12 months ago

I also have this feeling that I'm 2-10x more productive. But isn't it curious how a lot of devs feel this way, but no devs that I know have the experience that any of their colleagues have become 2-10x more productive?

nevertoolate• 12 months ago

10x means to me that i can finish a month of work in max 2 days and go cloud watching. What does it mean for you?

mwigdahl2• 12 months ago

<raises hand> Our automated test folks were chronically behind, struggling to keep up with feature development. I got the two assigned to the team that was the most behind set up with Claude Code. Six weeks later they are fully caught up, expanding coverage, and integrating AI code review into our build pipeline.

It's not 10x, but those guys do seem like they've hit somewhere around 2x improvement overall.

samtp3• 12 months ago

What type of work do you do and what type of code do you produce?

Because I've found it to work pretty amazingly for things that don't need to be exact (like data modeling) or don't have any security implications (public apps). But for everything else I end up having to find all the little bugs by reading the code line by line, which is much slower than just writing the code in the first place.

AstroBen4• 12 months ago

only 10x? I'm at least 100x as productive. I only type at a measly 100wpm, whereas Claude can output 100+ tokens a second

I'm outputting a PR every 6 minutes. The reviewers are using Claude to review everything. It used to take a day to add 100 lines to the codebase.. now I can add 100 lines in one prompt

If I want even more productivity (at risk of making the rest of my team look slow) I can tell Claude to output double the lines and ship it off for review. My performance metrics are incredible

samtp3• 12 months ago

So no human reads the actual code that you push to production? Are you not worried about security risks, spaghetti code, and other issues? Or does Claude magically make all of those concerns go away?

qingcharles4• 12 months ago

Not sure if joking...?

trallnag• 12 months ago

Big if true

screye3• 12 months ago

How do you maintain high confidence in the code it generates ?

My current bottleneck is having to review the huge amounts of code that these models spit out. I do TDD, use auto-linting and type-checking.... but the model makes insidious changes that are only visible on deep inspection.

sneak2• 12 months ago

You have to review your code for quality and bugs and errors now just as you did last month or last year. Did you never write bugs accidentally before?

We're all bottlenecked on reviewing now. That's a good thing.

theappsecguy• 12 months ago

The only way you could be 10x more productive is omit you were doing nothing before.

P24L• 12 months ago

The improved Opus isn’t about achieving significantly better peak performance for me. It’s not about pushing the high end of the spectrum. Instead, it’s about consistently delivering better average results - structuring outputs more effectively, self-correcting mistakes more reliably, and becoming a trustworthy workhorse for everyday tasks.

djha-skin• 12 months ago

Opus 4(.1) is so expensive[1]. Even Sonnet[2] costs me $5 per hour (basically) using OpenRouter + Codename Goose[3]. The crazy thing is Sonnet 3.5 costs the same thing[4] right now. Gemini Flash is more reasonable[5], but always seems to make the wrong decisions in the end, spinning in circles. OpenAI is better, but still falls short of Claude's performance. Claude also gives back 400's from its API if you CTRL-C in the middle though, so that's annoying.

Economics is important. Best bang for the buck seems to be OpenAI ChatGPT 4.1 mini[6]. Does a decent job, doesn't flood my context window with useless tokens like Claude does, API works every time. Gets me out of bad spots. Can get confused, but I've been able to muddle through with it.

1: https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-4.1

2: https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-sonnet-4

3: https://block.github.io/goose/

4: https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet

5: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-2.5-flash

6: https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-4.1-mini

generalizations2• 12 months ago

Get a subscription and use claude code - that's how you get actual reasonable economics out of it. I use claude code all day on the max subscription and maybe twice in the last two weeks have I actually hit usage limits.

tgtweak• 12 months ago

Is it considerably more cost effective than cline+sonnet api calls with caching and diff edits?

Same context length and throughput limits?

Anecdotally I find gpt4.1 (and mini) were pretty good at those agentic programming tasks but the lack of token caching made the costs blow up with long context.

seneca2• 12 months ago

Is there a way to sign up for Claude code that doesn't involve verifying a phone number with Anthropic? They don't even accept Google Voice numbers.

Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm not handing out my phone number to sign up for random SaaS tools.

teruakohatu• 12 months ago

Get a subscription and use claude code

I find the token/credit restrictions on Opus to be near useless even when using Claude Code. I only ever switch to it so get another model's take on the issue. Five minutes of use and I have hit the limit.

drusepth• 12 months ago

Is there any documentation on what the max sub usage limit is? A coworker tried it and was booted off Opus within just a couple hours due to "high usage". I haven't made the jump since I expect my $3k/mo on API would just instantly fly by a $200/mo sub and then I'd just be back on API again, but if it could carve out $1k-2k of costs for a little bit of time managing sub(s) it might be worth it.

thomasahle• 12 months ago

That's fine if you use it for private use. Doesn't work if you're building a product using Claude.

kroaton• 12 months ago

GLM 4.5 / Kimi K2 / Qwen Coder 3 / Gemini Pro 2.5

Aeolun5• 12 months ago

In every price comparison I make. Claude (API) always comes out cheapest if you manage to keep most of your context cached. 90% price reduction for input is crazy.

cma2• 12 months ago

Cached prices: $.31 for Gemini Pro / Mtok, $1.50 for claude opus 4.1 / Mtok

There's additional storage costs with google caching, around $3.75 for 5 minutes/Mtok, and Claude Opus is $3.75 for 5minute Cache Writes / Mtok.

For cached reads Gemini Pro is 5X cheaper than Opus and like $0.01 more than Sonnet.

energy123• 12 months ago

Large models are for querying the model

Small models are for querying the context

Opus is cheap if you use it for its niche

thimabi• 12 months ago

Large models are for querying the model
Small models are for querying the context

I respectfully disagree.

My experience is that large models are capable of understanding large contexts much better. Of course they are more expensive and slower, too. But in terms of accuracy, large models are always better at querying the context.

killerstorm• 12 months ago

Well, it's expensive compared to other models. But it's often much cheaper than human labor.

E.g. if need a self-contained script to do some data processing, for example, Opus can often do that in one shot. 500 line Python script would cost around $1, and as long as it's not tricky it just works - you don't need back-and-forth.

I don't think it's possible to employ any human to make 500 line Python script for $1 (unless it's a free intern or a student), let alone do it in one minute.

Of course, if you use LLM interactively, for many small tasks, Opus might be too expensive, and you probably want a faster model anyway. Really depends on how you use it.

(You can do quite a lot in file-at-once mode. E.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash could write 35 KB of code of a full ML experiment in Python - self-contained with data loading, model setup training, evaluation, all in one file, pretty much on the first try.)

paul7986• 12 months ago

Claude plus failed me today badly compared to chatGPT plus.

I uploaded a web design of mine (jpeg) and asked Claude to create the html/css. Asked GPT to do the same. GPT's code looked the closet to the design I created and uploaded. Just five to ten small tweaks and I was done vs. Claude it would have taken me almost triple the steps.

I actually subscribed to both today (resubscribed to GPT) and going to keep testing which one is the better front-end developer (i am, but got to embrace AI ).

alvis• 12 months ago

Funny Open AI and Anthropic seems to be coordinating their releases on the same day

KaoruAoiShiho• 12 months ago

For me this is the big news of the day. Looks insane.

hartator• 12 months ago

1 min read

What the point of these?

Kind of interesting that we live in an area of AI super advanced, but still make basic UI/UX mistake. The tagline of this blog post shouldn't be "1 min read".

It's not even accurate. I timed myself not reading fast but not slow, took me 3 min 30s. Maybe the images need be OCRed to make the estimation more accurate.

TimMeade• 12 months ago

This has been the worse Claude day ever. Just fell apart. Not sure if the release is why, but cursing in documents and can not fix a bug after hours of back and forth.

octo888• 12 months ago

You're prompting it wrong !

system2• 12 months ago

Claude lost me after I used it for a day. Their pricing model is bonkers. There is no way any developer in their right mind would go with Claude.

thirdacc• 12 months ago

Their API pricing is bonkers, their subscription is a great deal for what you get

sneak2• 12 months ago

Is it just me, or is Opus 4.1 substantially worse in Claude Code than Opus 4.0 was? I feel like I'm using Sonnet.

It's making really stupid errors and I have to work three times as much to get the same results as last week.

tecleandor• 12 months ago

Is there any tool like Claude Code that can go into the same "automatic feedback and coding loop" (I don't know if it has an official name) but compatible with using different LLMs.

I've used Aider for a while, and I kind of liked if, but it felt like it needed way more manual work, and I also want to use different models, probably locally hosted. Haven't used Aider in 2 or 3 months, so I don't know if it already has evolved in that way...

edit: in the other hand, the automatic feedback loop means it sometimes go very crazy and the API costs skyrocket easily. But maybe that's another reason to run it locally.

bananapub2• 12 months ago

opencode, but note that all the self-hosted llms are much worse at coding than claude code with opus/sonnet.

there's also claude-code-proxy to make claude code use other models.

ptrrrrrrppr• 12 months ago

Claude code proxy technically works with openai but tool use breaks every now and then on o3-mini, making it unusable for me

mitemte• 12 months ago

Claude Code Router (https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router) lets you use Claude Code with other, non-Anthropic models.

taoh• 12 months ago

Have been using it in Claude Code with Max Plan for one day. The rate of acceptance is noticeably higher.

camillomiller• 12 months ago

Well wait another 24hrs…

sbene970• 12 months ago

Opus 4.1 is now set as default model in Claude Code - just a heads-up.

drewbitt• 12 months ago

Not for me.

Claude Opus 4.1

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