cloverich

I take it you have - i guess can you provide some examples and how they would materially differ from what Anthropic would do then? It feels very similar on the surface.

They don't have anything competitive with Opus 5.5 yet. There is a supposed model in the works, "Bel" last time I paid attention to gossip, that is thought to be better, later this year. Allegedly Anthropic caught OpenAI off guard and / or their different training approaches ended up working better than anticipated.

My expectation is Fable 5.5 is next overall improvement, and my bet is OpenAI's "Bel" will be the next competitive one (or, their lack of safety culture will bite them/us in the process).

Wouldn't a better analogy be Google, which would actually contradict the point you are trying to make?

To clarify, i use both subscription pricing (personal use) and api pricing (at work). My spend going down was referring to api pricing, while using it more (for "everything").

Personal efficiency is noted as never hitting my limit despite it doing huge amounts of work at a time (ex: rewrite my notes app in swift for ios and install on my phone, 2 hours later its opened on my phone, looks nice, is working (base set of features). No follow up prompts, around 2 hours of work. 45% of my 5-hour limit.

Work efficiency is spend, task complexity, code quality (how often i have to steer - rare now), and wiring it up to more stuff (ex having it setup metrics and dashboards etc etc).

> increasingly commoditized

Is it increasingly though? As of 5.5 I stopped using other models all together (and I used to regularly swap, indifferently). My $20 sub no longer runs out, even though I do _much_ more than ever. I use it for every single task at work, even trivial ones, and my spend has gone down. I was given _free_ Codex and realized... it still wasn't worth it. My rational brain says Anthropic has no moat and this is temporary. The progress of all the other models is amazing. I certainly wouldn't bet on them.

But if I look at the actions of myself and the most competent coders around me, they are all doing this same thing - using 5.5 and not really looking around any longer. And we know its not even their best model. OpenAI may respond, Chinese labs may catch up. But for the moment, Anthropic seem to have added separation, not lost it, based on current vs prior _behavior_ of coders I know at home and work.

Also 2 years back the teachers strike in November for funds that... weren't there... that was pretty damaging to my argument to get my kids out of private and into public (we ended up moving to WA in the end).

Oregon is also extremely rural - Portland is the most populous city in the state by far, and its e.g. far smaller than all cities in the Houston/Austin/Dallas/SanAntonio metroplex. There's important cultural factors that impact its education too, like historic underfunding, poor education spending priorities, and out of touch unions (many days off, striking mid year for funds that aren't there). But I always felt the rural-ness impacting wider education trends was very under represented in discourse.

Build tools to help you understand. Build metrics that are proxies for the things you'd care about. Add constraints to the agent's work related to performance, error monitoring, language and architecture choices, review bots (that you tune and eventually, trust). If you don't have good ideas for tools, ask Fable what the best coders and industry experts would look at to establish trust, then feed that into models to build it. Don't sleep on how useful something like a (data-backed) claude artifact can be - i setup one today to track dependency and known vulnerabilties with a burndown chart and (agent) run log, one prompt, it was usable 5 minutes later. A colleague of mine did the same, but as a datadog notebook that also wires in relevant API metrics depending on what code has gone out in the last week, and suggests new longer term metrics to monitor as a result. Etc etc. its a crazy world but this has helped me cope so far.

> Doesn’t matter how smart the model is

Is this true? I'd heard loosely that the higher intelligence models are less reliant on the harness; I'm still wading into the details of those claims so maybe someone more well versed can chime in, but my expectation was the current phase of harness engineering was likely only needed temporarily. I suppose turning Opus 5.5 loose in a variety of harnesses could be a decent if anecdotal test of that?

> has some input

The president proposes the entire budget, and can veto the entire budget regardless of which party is in power. Of course Congress has immense influence and you also can't pass a budget they don't agree with. That doesn't change that not only does the president matter (the claim I'm refuting), they are the most important single person that matters, by design.

The president effectively does because of Veto. They inly cant control the most bipartisan aspects which is very limited today.

> Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works.

...unfortunately it took 57 years to unravel, but the cryptic exploit resulting in our telomeres suddenly expiring took a mere 42.

Until Opus 5.5 I agreed with this. But since then... I'm now able to build just about anything I want, quickly. Including... all the reasons I'm on a mac (or presumably, one on windows) in the first place. IDK if I believe in my heart just yet, but as a long time mac user, if you gave me the choice between mac + commodity model or a near naked Linux laptop + Opus 5.5, I would easily choose Opus 5.5 and build what I want. If this is real, I think Google is still in a good spot, but are Apple and Microsoft? They have no models themselves. They do have hardware but the value of their OS (in Apples case) and software (in MS case) becomes extremely devalued, relatively speaking.