The weirdest thing about this AI revolution is how smooth and continuous it is. If you look closely at differences between 4.6 and 4.5, it’s hard to see the subtle details.

A year ago today, Sonnet 3.5 (new), was the newest model. A week later, Sonnet 3.7 would be released.

Even 3.7 feels like ancient history! But in the gradient of 3.5 to 3.5 (new) to 3.7 to 4 to 4.1 to 4.5, I can’t think of one moment where I saw everything change. Even with all the noise in the headlines, it’s still been a silent revolution.

Am I just a believer in an emperor with no clothes? Or, somehow, against all probability and plausibility, are we all still early?

If you've been using each new step is very noticeable and so have the mindshare. Around Sonnet 3.7 Claude Code-style coding became usable, and very quickly gained a lot of marketshare. Opus 4 could tackle significant more complexity. Opus 4.6 has been another noticable step up for me, suddenly I can let CC run significantly more independently, allowing multiple parallel agents where previously too much babysitting was required for that.

In terms of real work, it was the 4 series models. That raised the floor of Sonnet high enough to be "reliable" for common tasks and Opus 4 was capable of handling some hard problems. It still had a big reward hacking/deception problem that Codex models don't display so much, but with Opus 4.5+ it's fairly reliable.

Honestly, 4.5 Opus was the game changer. From Sonnet 4.5 to that was a massive difference.

But I'm on Codex GPT 5.3 this month, and it's also quite amazing.

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