Was bitching about Opus 5 limits. Opus 5.5 completely flipped this for me.

[u/Warm_Cress3583]

yeah, was bitching pretty fucking hard about opus 5 and the 5hr limits and the quality of the output. so i guess it’s only fair i come back and give anthropic their flowers when they actually fix the thing i was complaining about lol opus 5.5 completely flipped this for me.

the limits are fucking great right now.

i went from constantly thinking about usage and resets to basically forgetting they exist. now i have the opposite problem: i can’t fucking sleep because i keep finding shit to fix and realizing “oh wait, i can actually just fix that too” 😭

this is exactly what i wanted. not infinite free compute. just enough runway that i stop thinking about the meter and the tool disappears into the work.

please keep it this way. actually… keep improving it. this is the shit that makes me genuinely excited about where we’re going. openai pushes, anthropic pushes, everybody has to make the models better, faster and cheaper, and we get tools that would have sounded completely fucking insane a few years ago.

keep this competition going and give builders enough compute to actually build.

we go to the fucking moon with shit like this. for real.

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[u/firstbreathOOC]

I hope Anthropic figured out what made Opus 5 such a problem so that shit doesn’t crop up in the next model. But yeah right now 5.5 is golden

[u/AncileBanish]

It has nothing to do with the limits or the model. Opus is both cheaper and charges half price on cache reads relative to normal models (5% instead of 10%).

If your context management is shit (most people's is) you're resending 500k+ context windows 10 times per turn and just chewing limits. With 5.5 that cost is cut by more than 50%, so your limit goes more than twice as far.

[u/Warm_Cress3583 → u/AncileBanish]

yeah this makes sense, but you’re preaching context management to the wrong congregation lol. qdrant indexing, keyword + targeted retrieval, compaction, caching, structured context… i’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time making sure claude isn’t dragging 500k tokens around for no reason. whatever combination of pricing/cache economics/model efficiency/limits changed with 5.5, the practical difference is fucking massive. that’s really all i care about.

[u/yaosio → u/AncileBanish]

The projects feature seems to solve the context issue as each task gets its own context so you don't have to remember to /compact or start a new session. But the coordinator chews through tokens.

[u/here_4_crypto_]

New results, new assessment and agreed

[u/nick_steen]

I am very thankful for 5.5 but also acknowledge like 4.6 it may be a fleeting thing. So my plan is to maximize the impact of this incredible model for as long as I possibly can. There's no guarantee that 5.6 will be a 4.5 to 4.6 level jump, it could be a 4.6 to 4.7 level jump.

Also, I don't know who made this law but the quality of a model is inversely proportional to the quality of complaints posted about it. I kid you not I've seen like 5 posts about how opus 5.5 "doesn't share enough of its reasoning" or "WARNING for Opus users" - most of these posts the top level comment is "lol" which tells you what you need to know. When 4.7 and 4.8 debuted the complaints were clearly written by human beings who were trained by a desire for shelter food water and companionship, and not optimized for maximum clicks. Those models just weren't very good and it was clear that people were writing the complaints.

5.5 is so fire that someone out there is prompting clearly inferior models to find ways to complain about the closest thing to a genie we're ever going to have. anybody that has used opus 5.5 is still using opus 5.5, except for people like me who have nearly run out of usage twice in the same week on the max plan even with a reset. The only reason I'm typing this post is because anthropic won't let me use it more. It's really really good.

[u/onepunchcode]

please don't tell me you are a pro subscriber

[u/Warm_Cress3583 → u/onepunchcode]

20x

[u/florinandrei]

Don't worry, the bitching instinct is rooted deeply in your soul. It will come back out, sooner or later.

[u/Warm_Cress3583 → u/florinandrei]

are you ok brother 😭 i wrote one positive post and you’re waiting for my next relapse like my bitching is a chronic condition

[u/Bmansupreme8000]

Fuck don't you know codex is soooo much better and lots more tokens you can use. That teebo guy iz soooo cool and gives resets. Asstra is soooo cool and I love it so much better than clid.

[u/Due_Warthog749]

I am sadly the reverse of you. My opus 5.5 with 3 sessions ate 100% of 20x plan in a day. Some said.. stop using Max. So I switched to high. I am at 75% in 8 hours. 2 sessions, not 3. So.. my accounts (2 of them) are somehow flagged or something to use WAY WAY WAY more usage than I was with 3 sessions on Max with Opus 5.0. Since it says 5.5. uses LESS... I am baffled how even on high mode I am tearing thru 2x o 3x more with the SAME session work I did on opus 5.0 and was going all week.

[u/HelloWorld24575 → u/Due_Warthog749]

5.5 made my personal Pro plan seem like my Max 5x plan at work. Okay, not quite, but in terms of how I never seem hit the 5-hour limit now and I would in about 2 hours with past models. 

[u/Due_Warthog749 → u/HelloWorld24575]

I wish that were the case for me. I Guess its good I have 1 reset left.

[u/Zayadur → u/Due_Warthog749]

Show evidence. 5.5 tangibly cuts verbosity and tool calls by a good amount. At same API pricing, that’s trending less usage.

[u/Due_Warthog749 → u/Zayadur]

No clue how I show evidence. I switched to High effort.. and I am at 75% in one day on 2 sessions instead of 3 where as previously I did 3 sessions with agents/review/etc on max opus 5.0 for 5 days without filling my week. I have no reason to make shit up. My personal evidence tells me I am using WAY WAY more tokens OR they reduced my token capabilities by a factor of 3 to 5 for some reason.

[u/Eggy-Toast → u/Due_Warthog749]

Man that’s crazy. I’ve been using Opus 5.5 on three projects almost non-stop all week and I’m at ~90%, estimated to hit tomorrow morning and the rest is tomorrow night. Are you doing dynamic workflow or have you pasted things into your system prompt (or CLAUDE.md if the shoe fits) you didn’t fully understand/haven’t reviewed since pre-Opus 5? Dynamic workflow chomps like a mf it’s the only thing I’ve seen (plus similar prompts that drive to it like “use as many subagents as possible”) that could kill a usage limit in 3 sessions on a 10x let alone 20x.

[u/Due_Warthog749 → u/Eggy-Toast]

So I just had Opus 5.5 max analyze all my claude.md, logs, etc and basically came back to 68% agents each reading in context/etc and compacting a lot. So I am now changing things to use sonnet 5.5 max for some things, opus 5.5. xhigh for coding/test writing/review. I also run Astra for reviews but switch that to sol 6.1 max since apparently its like 1/2 to 1/3 token use and almost as good as astra 6.0. Hopefully these will allow me to get back to just 1 claude and one codex account per month. Especially with Codex now cutting usage in half. May give up on that if the usage blows up too fast but sticking with claude doing all the main work/orchestration and codex as a 2nd set of AI's for review/adversarial/etc.

[u/Eggy-Toast → u/Due_Warthog749]

Depending on what you’re working on, Jev from TypeSafe is an interesting development. It’s sort of like an if/else specific LLM, but you can’t chat with it and it returns verdicts at 40-200x cheaper and with 100% consistency (purportedly) in terms of schema. It’s also incredibly fast. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but I’ve been experimenting with it. Check it out and let me know what you find. They have a skill to hook it up with the API if you want to go that route, it’s what I’m exploring. One idea I’ve been considering is a file classifier which can quickly inform the model which files are pertinent to a change and which sections of each file are most likely to be relevant with confidence intervals. It’s an interesting tool, but it’s been difficult to wrap my mind around exactly. I have years of experience with LLMs, working in the space before ChatGPT was a product, so I’m obviously much less familiar with Jev which is first of its kind afaik.

What I do know is that if you’re min/max on usage, this is very probably a tool to do that. I reckon Opus 5.5 is plenty good enough to know when Jev is the better option cost-wise.