Nick Heiner

What's your take on that?

I've logged hundreds of hours on Opus 4.5.

Nice.

Yeah, no, it's extremely good.

And I mean, especially in the last part of the year, you know, getting the 4.1 clods and then the 4.5 clods, you know, each one was like a really noticeable step up and in conjunction with clod code also having a lot of improvements.

And yeah, I don't see any reason that this is going to slow down in 2026.

Yeah.

And then to tie back to your question about knowledge work generally, you know, on software engineering, we've had, you know, a full year, you know, a very long time to get used to this idea that agents are going to do a ton of our work.

But the question is how generalizable is this going to be to other fields?

Like when you make the elite tier coding agent that can sort of do any coding task a human could do, is it going to turn out that like, yeah, and then with only six more weeks of work, you also have the elite tier tax prep.

And then three weeks after that, you have, you know, the elite tier customer support or recruiter or whatever.

And it could be that people in those industries that like aren't, you know, like if you don't have a software engineer in your life, you like might not realize how fast this stuff is going.

And it might be if it generalizes really well that these agents are going to come like ripping out of software engineering and then just like remake other industries at an absolutely dizzying pace.

Yeah, so this is like, you know, a classic vibes-based take, right?

Of just like, you've spent a ton of time with these novels.

Yeah, which I do too, right?

I mean, we all do it.

But we at Surge are actually about to release a creative writing benchmark.

And I don't know if we're going to test it on 3.5 because it's a little older, but...

This is something that, like, makes me really excited because, like, yeah, I'll have some vague sense of, like, I do kind of think Claude is better at writing than ChatGPT.