Is this true?
I barely notice any improvements ever since... 4.6? At least for software development.
Opus makes the same sort of mistakes and has the same sort of strengths ever since that point in my perception. My impressions is that increasing the number of parameters clearly has diminishing returns.
In fact, the best improvement I got from Claude was Haiku 5.5. Good cheap workhorse to implement plans.
[–] AnotherGoodName 10 hours ago
[–] surgical_fire 9 hours ago
No, you can't. Because you invalidate your argument by adding later:
> Personally i do see 5.5 as much better
It has to be one or the other.
Either each minor release Anthropic farts is a major improvement from what came before, or I don't see much difference because it has been very little time in between releases. Holding both arguments as true would require me to be excessively apologetic for a company that desires a 2T IPO.
And to be clear, I do think that there is an argument that not much time has passed since Opus 4.6 and Chat GPT 5.3 Codex days.
Part of this conundrum may be because the models reached a good enough point for software development. Maybe walking 80% of the way was easier than the final 20%. I am nowadays more excited about how cheap models can be useful for it (hence my positive remark about Haiku 5.5 and Chinese models in general).
As in your statement to me indicates that you clearly see the scaling working over longer timespans. You chose a relatively recent 2026 model as your baseline after all, not a 2025 model or earlier. You clearly see that the 2026 model is better than ones in the past.
Might i suggest that you perhaps just don't see the improvement as clearly when comparing iterations that are fairly close together? If you're not anecdotally seeing improvement between an early 2026 model and one from ~6 months later perhaps just give it another iteration? Personally i do see 5.5 as much better but i can understand not seeing a lot of difference to 4.6 since they literally aren't that far apart in releases.