> All that keeps jumping out at me is how they've set it to refuse giving users thinking tokens and prompts for full reasoning in output

I keep seeing comments added to code, which reads like reasoning output instead of meaningful words. I see this behavior for both OpenAI and Anthropic models (for several harnesses as well).

But this is a sample of one. And I may be in a situation where I'm more negative to the output from LLMs in general.

What Chinese models/providers are you using for this? I'm hitting Claude's weekly limits much sooner than I used to with roughly the same workload, so I'm interested in trying alternatives, especially ones with strong coding/agentic performance.

Crazy how tables have turned. Life seems surreal since 2020.

The whole notion of seat-based pricing seems wrong to me as well.

What Chinese provider would you use that is on par with Claude code?

All LLMs understand natural language. All LLMs understand examples. That's honestly more compatibility than you get nearly anywhere, in anything.

The reason why advanced prompting is a moving target is that a lot of prompting is "use extra instructions to compensate for specific ways in which the target LLM is weak or prone to errors". And guess what? LLMs get better over time - obsoleting your advanced prompting.

"Tune a prompt to death for the specific task and the specific model" gets you better performance in the moment, but "trust LLM to be smart" ages a lot more gracefully.

    And guess what? LLMs get better over time - obsoleting your advanced prompting.

Agreed.

I'm genuinely worried about all our short term investment in mitigating the failure modes of models that may only be SOTA for a few months.

It's very possible people being 'late' adopting AI may end up with a leg up, not only because they spent more time polishing personal skills during this time, but also because they don't bring all the baggage of 'AI competence' that is becoming irrelevant at breakneck speed.

> It was 'fun' at the start, now it's just 'broken technology'.

It was even more 'broken' at the start. We overcame some of the issues by 'prompt engineering', which is needed less in the newer, smarter models.

You'll find similar documentation anytime a language or framework or other systems software ships a new major version. It doesn't seem like the way to prompt Opus has changed all that much. Certainly not enough to require a "totally different prompting technique."

Counterpoint, the differentiation is maturity. If all models are simply interchangeable commodities, what's the payoff for Anthropic or OpenAI?

Vastly different ways of interacting with each provider is another story, but really we are pretty spoiled here. Slightly different prompting techniques is not really a big deal. If anything it shows the user has some nuance and appreciation for what each model provides.

Fow what it's worth, I am super happy with Opus 5.5. Less verbose than 5 and just gets work done. The progress has been astounding, and if I have to coax it out a bit differently on Opus 5.5 vs Astra 6, I am happy to pay that small price.

Opus 5.5 does NOT need anything other than some javascript/typescript libraries to make very detailed 2d and 3d visualizations. I've spent a week worth of tokens just feeling out what it can do.

The step function change on Opus 5.5 for visual work shocked me.. and I haven't been surprised like this in a long time with LLMs.

EDIT: When I first saw the "P(DOOM)" video and some of the other animations I was VERY skeptical that Opus 5.5 without a lot of tools could make something like that.. until I tried it for myself. It can.. 100%.

I feel like we have different expectations from these frontier models. I don't use Claude code or any agent that has acts to my local machine. I roll up the code and give it the text file that contains all the code. I asked Claude Opus 5.5 max to make me a 2D terminal based racing game with no assets drawings or audio and it exceeded my expectations. Only one failed unit test and that one too it said the test was faulty rather than the code.

I'm still more worried about the malice and any malicious acts by the people at these frontier labs than the models at the frontier labs.

"a lot of the models work was essentially coordinating everything." - I don't see anything wrong with that personally. It's still extremely challenging to build a model harness, and having a model-mediated everything is clearly wishful thinking. It's exhausting to keep up with, but also somewhat exciting, all depends on your perspective of course.

>"x generated this in one shot, this is agi"

Reminds me of the time when you could program a spreadsheet in the 90s and people who didn't know computers would think you were so smart to have invented spreadsheets

Claude code has been hiding tool calls for some months now :(

I don't get it either. Ditto for visual design capability. It's so far above Opus 5 and yet the announcement mentioned nothing about it.

Underneath this means that you have say 50 tests and you grade each of them out of 10, then there was no test it did worse on.

The data doesn't support it being better on every test (sometimes the score will be the same imperfect one, sometimes both will have gotten a perfect score).