It's because the models keep getting better! What you could do with GPT-4 was more impressive than what you could do with GPT 3.5. What you could do with Sonnet 3.5 was more impressive yet, and Sonnet 4, and Sonnet 4.5.

Some of these improvements have been minor, some of them have been big enough to feel like step changes. Sonnet 3.7 + Claude Code (they came out at the same time) was a big step change; Opus 4.5 similarly feels like a big step change.

(If you don't trust vibes, METR's task completion benchmark shows huge improvements, too.)

If you're sincerely trying these models out with the intention of seeing if you can make them work for you, and doing all the things you should do in those cases, then even if you're getting negative results somehow, you need to keep trying, because there will come a point where the negative turns positive for you.

If you're someone who's been using them productively for a while now, you need to keep changing how you use them, because what used to work is no longer optimal.

Opus 4.5 is categorically a much better model from benchmarks and personal experience than Opus 4.1 & Sonnet models. The reason you're seeing a lot of people wax about O4.5 is that it was a real step change in reliable performance. It crossed for me a critical threshold in being able to solve problems by approaching things in systematic ways.

Why do you use the word "chasing" to describe this? I don't understand. Maybe you should try it and compare it to earlier models to see what people mean.

To repeat my other comment:

> Opus 4.5 is categorically a much better model from benchmarks and personal experience than Opus 4.1 & Sonnet models. The reason you're seeing a lot of people wax about O4.5 is that it was a real step change in reliable performance. It crossed for me a critical threshold in being able to solve problems by approaching things in systematic ways.

Why did you jump to the assumption that this:

> The new normal isn't like that. Rewrite an existing cleanly implemented Vanilla JavaScript project (with tests) in React the kind of rote task you can throw at a coding agent like Claude Code and come back the next morning and expect most (and occasionally all) of the work to be done.

... meant that person would do it in a clandestine fashion rather than this be an agreed upon task prior? Is this how you operate?

It's really hard to predict how other developers are going to work, especially given how resistant a lot of developers are to fully exploring the new tools.

I do think there's been a bit of a shift in the last two months, with GPT 5.1 and 5.2 Codex and Opus 4.5.

We have models that can reliably follow complex instructions over multiple hour projects now - that's completely new. Those of us at the cutting edge are still coming to terms with the consequences of this (as illustrated by this Karpathy tweet).

I don't trust my predictions myself, but I think the next few months are going to see some big changes in terms of what mainstream developers understand these tools as being capable of.

"The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

At some companies, most developers already are using it in their day to day. IME, the more senior the developer is, the more likely they are to be heavily using LLMs to write all/most of their code these days. Talking to friends and former coworkers at startups and Big Tech (and my own coworkers, and of course my own experience), this isn't a "someday" thing.

People who work at more conservative companies, the kind that don't already have enterprise Cursor/Anthropic/OpenAI agreements, and are maybe still cautiously evaluating Copilot... maybe not so much.