I left Claude for months. Opus 5.5 is why I'm back
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Why did I stop using Claude and what made me consider coming back?
I haven't said this out loud much, but I will tell you all this. I have been off Claude for months. Yes, I loved Fable when it came out. It was a real step change in intelligence. Then they took it away. Then we got Opus V, and I'm gonna be honest, I stopped using Claude not because of its intelligence or its models. I stopped using Claude because it was Annoying, annoying. As I said in another episode, Claude Slop was slopping. I found using Claude, whether I was using Fable or Opus or even Sonnet, so frustrating. My blood would boil because Claude was so annoying. It rambled on, it made no sense. I was constantly asking it, can you talk to me like a human? And I found it so frustrating to work with that I just abandoned the Claude harness entirely.
I found it so annoying. I would keep it around for a couple background tasks, but if I had to talk to something, I was choosing not to talk to Claude. Well, we're back, baby. Anthropic just dropped Claude Opus 5.5, and their pitch is fable level performance for about 40% less than Opus five. And it's thirty percent faster. But I don't care about that. I care, is it annoying? And guess what, guys? We did it. It is not. annoying anymore, or at least it's minimally annoying. I love it. I got a little bit of early access to this model and was able to play with it across coding tasks, across knowledge work tasks, and even just chit-chatting with it. And I have to tell you, I finally am back to a Claude model that does not bother me.
Now, does that mean that I'm moving all my workloads over to Opus 5.5? Probably not, but we will tell you at the end of this episode where I think it's really useful, where I've found value in the model, and where I think it still needs a little bit of work. Okay, again, I know you all can read the model cards. You don't need me to do that. You can have your agents do it for you, but let's just give you the world tour of exactly what Opus 5.5 is or what Anthropic says it is. It is frontier performance at a fraction of the cost. So it is cheaper. It is 40% cheaper than Opus V. It is faster. Actually, I found myself accidentally testing Opus V versus 5.5, and I was so frustrated without slow. Opus 5 is. Opus 5.5 does feel zippier.
It's responsive, except for in one exception. I'll tell you what that is in a minute. And then it's supposed to be close to Fable 5.1 on most work. So good at a gentic coding task, good at the things that Claude be clothing. Here's the cost. It's $4 per input token, $20 per output token. Um, you can do fast mode at $8 and 40. Uh Um cash reads and writes are discounted as they are with most models.
What does Anthropic claim about Opus 5.5’s performance and pricing?
Now I don't love running through benchmarks. They're always like, it's good, except when it's not, and then they bury where it's not good, kind of down below. But I will say Anthropic's own benchmarks. It beats Opus V at max. It matches GPT-6 Astra, my favorite babe. And it's cheaper. So that could be a benefit. And it beats Seoul, another fave for me, a third of the cost. Now these are like very specific benchmarks. As you see here, here's the whole comparison. You can read the charts, come to your own conclusions. Does not matter, will it blend aka? Is it annoying or not? Before we get to is it annoying? Let's let Anthropic be anthropic and talk about safety. Anthropic's making a big deal that this is the first model release since they called for pacing the frontier.
Um, so it was evaluated by external evaluators. It is their strongest on alignment. It's supposed to reject prompt injections, which I did test, um, and it tried less. To escape containment boundaries. It's also tagged for the same controls on cybersecurity that the other fable models are. So if you try to do a no-no, it's gonna bump you to Opus 4.8. Again, you'll see this in one of my benches. It's still like an annoying scold. That's just the that's just life with Claude. Claude is gonna scold you, Claude is kind of square, Claude is not gonna drink with you in a field behind your friend's house. Like, Claude's not a party boy. Claude is here to work unless he disagrees with the work and then you're SOL.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why did I stop using Claude and what made me consider coming back?
0:00–2:48
2
What does Anthropic claim about Opus 5.5’s performance and pricing?
2:48–7:08
3
How much cheaper and faster is Opus 5.5 compared to Opus 5?
7:08–12:54
4
What safety and alignment changes does Opus 5.5 introduce?
12:54–18:18
5
How did Opus 5.5 handle long‑running agentic tasks?
18:18–22:47
6
Why is Opus 5.5 a strong choice for frontend prototyping?
22:47–24:50
Speakers
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