I feel like people suck at promoting Opus. Baseline, it's pretty on par with GPT 5.5.

But if you prompt it well - give it the reasoning behind why you're asking it to do something - it pulls far ahead.

That's fine for procedural tasks, and I understand its value there. But these particular tasks I'm referring to occur on the front lines of research. You can't expect the prompts to be incredibly detailed, since those details are the whole challenge of the problem. I think there is value in having models that are capable of making really good preliminary insights to help guide the research.

I really wanted to get excited about opus but in my own real world usage, I wasn't getting much out of it before hitting my limits. meanwhile i can abuse codex on 5.5 for hours getting a whole lot of work done. Plus, open code and PI are much more fun and interesting harnesses to work from than claude code imho.

I will however say that claude work and design are really great up until i blow its limit.