sutterd

I am guessing this just means OpenAI is running at a bigger loss than Anthropic, not that that improves the situation.

I find fable better at high level planning, as in planning a task without filling in all the details. Opus doesn’t seem to be great at this, but other models aren’t either.

I think there are different views you can have here. I think PG is in the group that thinks if you get a billion dollars, you earned a billion dollars. His distinction is between getting the billion dollars honestly or dishonestly. The alternate view is that you can get 100 billion dollars, presumably honestly, but that doesn't mean you earned a billion dollars. The first group will say this is splitting hairs. The second group will say that is the whole point. It the company gets a billion dollars, did it earn a billion dollars? Even more to the point, if the company earns a billion dollars, does the founder/CEO, or whoever is refernced in this post, earn a billion dollars? I think the two groups will just see this differently.

Fable was a big improvement in planning for me over Opus. I usually do a bit of work preparing tasks before handing them off to Opus or else I get bad results. I didn't plan on writing software this week because I was working on other things but changed my mind to test out Fable. I didn't have any work prepared. Fable was able to write the high level plans that later turned into coding tasks. Of course any model could wirte plans like that, but I had confidence in these plans similar how Opus 4.5 gave me a huge jump in confidence in the code it wrote. (Honest, I am not paid to write this.)

A large share of invested money is passive, especially in the S&P 500. If some people pull out, it could cause a very damaging cascade. There would be a forced sale of stocks with maybe no buyers.

I am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good is that it is effectively a very high level computer language, where the agent can implement a lot of underlying code with a short English description, often. But many other times it takes a lot of work to get what you want.

I never adopted Opus 4.6 because it was too prone to doing things on its own. Anthropic called it "a bias towards action". I think 4.5 and 4.7 are much better in this regard. I'm not saying they are immune to this kind of thing though.

I’m working on a side project and AI is writing all the code. The code it produces is not good, and this comes from someone who has experience producing bad code. One thing I’m worried about is places like GitHub being full of AI code, which leads to AI being trained on AI code. It seems like this will lead to a downward spiral.

What kind of performance are people getting now? I was running 4.7 yesterday and it did a remarkably bad job. I recreated my repo state exactly and ran the same starting task with 4.5 (which I have preferred to 4.6). It was even worse, by a large margin. It is likely my task was a difficult or poorly posed, but I still have some idea of what 4.5 should have done on it. This was not it. What experiences are other people having with the 4.7? How about with other model versions, if they are trying them? (In both cases, I ran on max effort, for whatever that is worth.)

With my use of Claude code, I find 4.7 to be pretty good about clarifying things. I hated 4.6 for not doing this and had generally kept using 4.5. Maybe they put this in the chat prompt to try to keep the experience similar to before? I definitely do not want this in Claude code.

I am getting pretty good performance. Even on trivial questions it seems to go through the thinking process end. If they are using adaptive thinking, it seems to work much better than before. I will see how my experience goes with more usage.

You don't have to use adaptive thinking. It had been turned off on my main work computer. I was using a different computer on a trip and I started getting so angry at Claude for doing a bad job. I evetually figured out it was adaptive thinking and set it to "hard" and it started working again. At the time I think "hard" was the top choice. With 4.7, my computer now shows "xhard", which I assume is the equivelent setting. There is one higher setting than this, which I haven't tried yet. I would tell you how to change these settings, but I don't remember. By the way, I have been happy with 4.7 so far. I actually did not like 4.6 and preferred 4.5 and used that most of the time until this new release.

I liked Opus 4.5 but hated 4.6. Every few weeks I tried 4.6 and, after a tirade against, I switched back to 4.5. They said 4.6 had a "bias towards action", which I think meant it just made stuff up if something was unclear, whereas 4.5 would ask for clarfication. I hope 4.7 is more of a collaborator like 4.5 was.