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.

To back this up we have a discord chat for the board game terraforming mars where the agent takes input and vibe codes an open source implementation of the game.

https://tfmbot.com is the link (discord and source links on the splash screen).

The results are fucking incredible to the point where people in discord are stating "I'm surprised this is working so well". I am too.

I feel like there's a group online that missed the boat. Anything negative towards AI capabilities is still upvoted but I've been in the industry for over 25years, highly respected and can't fathom the "AI dumb lololol" type of comments i see on HN. AI is superseeding all other ways to develop.

I would also say: I think this works great because the goal is well-defined and measurable.

I’ve also used Opus 5.5 on some hill-climbing, and a lot more steering is required here, because … eval is hard.

Agree Opus 5.5 is incredible and efficient with Claude Max Usage.What a jump after the writing slop you got from Opus 5. I had moved to using Fable for my orchestration workflow mainly due to the communication issue (I think Opus 5 was capable enough but spoke in riddles so you lost confidence quickly)..With 5.5 it needs less steering now and communicates well, and I have had the same CC session running for the last week (obviously compacting with durable plans etc as the post), with it PM'ing my home built agent orchestration of the other coding agents(antigravity, codex, pi etc) and making decent decisions and all the recommendations are normally usually good.

9 hours?!

It’s great, but you still need to know what you are doing, not just the goal/s. I built a platform years ago from scratch, and now I am remaking it with more features and more polished design, I know exactly what needs to be done to tiniest details. The first prompt was very well detailed about the architecture and how everything should work, after an hour work at Xhigh, it did create the blueprint artifacts that I asked for, then I spent 3 days reading every single thing and writing notes, turned out it made the system overly complicated without adding extra value, plus I can see how some of the architecture design will be potentially a security risk. So after few days I fed my notes, this time took 4hours and 1M tokens! Later I spent more few days reviewing and writing notes, it was closer to what I want but still made architecture errors, the third run took around an hour and finally made it how it supposed to be, although there are still more notes on non critical stuff. So I don’t think we are yet at the stage where sitting goals and some high level is enough to produce quality results.

Meh... There's a reason Opus 4.6 is still an option.

Pros know these are lower cost models.

>> It’s a really good model.

In the meantime, I have cancelled my Anthropic subscription...

I have a simple test that I have been running iteratively across the SOTA models from several vendors, including one Chinese vendor.

I start with some code produced by an Anthropic SOTA model...let’s call that Code A. Then I get Code B and Code C for the same task from models by two other vendors.

Then I ask each model to review and critique the other proposals.

By the end, both the Anthropic model and I usually run out of arguments... against them and agree that proposals B and C are better.

Claude then always asks whether it can incorporate the code or ideas from B and C into its own solution...

Is "wall-clock" an actual term you used before Claude? I had never heard it before the model used it and I can't stand it.