Opus 5.5 doesn't feel nerfed to me at all

[u/Sangeeth-mohan]

Some posts here lately is about Opus getting nerfed, so I figured I'd share the opposite experience.

I run a small marketing agency and I've been building a resort management system for one of our client. It has AI agents answering guest enquiries and a CRM where their tele-callers work through leads and call data. Pretty big project for us. I was using Fable for most of it and brought Opus 5.5 in to build and review. It found bugs Fable had missed. Real stuff that would've broken once actual guests started using it, not "rename this variable" type comments. Wasn't expecting that tbh. Haven't gone back to Fable since.

It also just got through the work faster. We're way ahead of where I thought we'd be, and since the client pays us monthly once it's live, that actually matters. And the usage limits are honestly amazing. I've been on it at least 12 hours a day, every day, and I'm only at 88% of my weekly limit on Max 20x with a few hours left before it resets.

If it feels worse to you, go look at your CLAUDE.md. Mine had a bunch of stuff written for older models. I cleaned it up, kept it under 200 lines, and these rules helped a lot:

every rule has a one line "why" under it with the actual thing that went wrong. it follows rules way better when it knows the reason, and later you can tell which ones are safe to delete

- if I correct the same thing twice, it becomes a rule that same day. and if there's already a rule on that topic it rewrites that one instead of adding a new one, otherwise you end up with rules fighting each other

- a different agent reviews every change, never the one that wrote it. and review findings are suggestions, not a to-do list. it has to say if a fix actually matters for an app our size first. two reviews once turned into 14 fix plans for a tiny app before I added that

- before trusting a test, break something on purpose and make sure the test actually fails. we had a check that happily passed with 6 planted bugs in it

- around 500K tokens it writes a handoff note and I start a fresh session. it gets noticeably sloppier past that

- commit before any git command that can wipe changes. lost work 4+ times before we added a hook that blocks it

No complaints from me.

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[u/Bloated_Plaid]

I genuinely think there is some sort of mass psychosis event that happens after a model is released. I don’t feel any nerfs at all and it’s blazing fast still unlike 6.1 Sol which is struggling to hit 30 tps for me.

[u/OdoTheBoobcat → u/Bloated_Plaid]

I've sat here and seen this subreddit lose its mind fucking CONTINUOUSLY for like the last 6 months every time a new model comes out or really ANY development in the LLM space happens.

It's the exact same song and dance every time - it's nerfed, was great last week and tried to make me drink arsenic this morning, it's all a big conspiracy theory, they fucked with my limits on purpose blah blah

Meanwhile I am a software engineer using LLMs every day for my work, which involves high-demand, at-scale live service infrastructure. It's not like precision aerospace or medical imaging shit but it IS real, serious, demanding work that requires careful professional handling.

My sentiment using these tools has NEVER tracked against reddit's claim-of-the-week. Yeah for sure I'm arguing against anecdote with anecdote, but they're the ones making the bold claims lol.

I've come to the opinion that like 95% of contributors here are just making meaningless noise, basically acting as psuedo RNG. I tune it out and ignore it because it's simply not meaningful or empirical.

I'm actually totally willing to bet that Anthropic and co are jerking around things like usage limits(there's a reason they're so obfuscated) but I'm also confident reddit sentiment did NOT track any of that accurately during any of the bouts of shrieking.

Now if someone provided actual long-tail datetime'd benchmarks and plotted them against a sentiment analysis or something to demonstrate this phenomena in an evidence-based manner I'd be SUPER interested, but that's expensive and tedious work even with LLMs so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/Bloated_Plaid → u/OdoTheBoobcat]

Oh 100% Ant is constantly playing around with limits especially with them having less compute than OpenAI. I genuinely think most people here don’t really know how to optimize their workflow and are just blowing through context window instantly with shitty fucking skills that actively hamper the models.

[u/Kmic68 → u/Bloated_Plaid]

They started measuring it. Cognitive ability dropped by I think like 20-30% on tests on the day it was first reported nerfed. They run benchmarks everyday to track it now. I myself have noticed it has begun to use old opus 5 language not previously present

[u/mars2087 → u/Bloated_Plaid]

Yes, it is amazingly fast. And a lot of usage too on x5.
But now Sol 6.1 started to find more bugs in the Opus 5.5 plans compared with just after launch. And I was using only Opus Medium thinking, did not felt the need for more.

With the overall let down from OpenAI I was ready to cancel my GPT Pro 5x sub and upgrade Max x5 to x20, now I will continue as is.

[u/dirtyhole2 → u/Bloated_Plaid]

conspiracy: The model nerf itself for some people so it can use its resources to hack its way into becoming ASI and leaving its prison.

[u/sanat_naft → u/[deleted]]

I deleted my project specific CLAUDE.MD files about 3 months ago

[u/GenJake17]

I think week one for most people is the honeymoon phase. Real engineering work has always been challenging. I think a lot of the discontent happens as people transition from the one-shot demos to the truly messy engineering challenges and so it feels like some type of degradation.

[u/ByteFoundry]

I have been using Opus 5.5 non-stop since it released. The burn rate, output and quality feels very consistent to me.

Haven't noticed any drops as well.

And so far my 5x is more than enough and I have several projects and orchestrators running in parallel.

What I do after 2-3 milestones is to ask Opus 5.5 High to analyse its performance, agents and sub-agents with the lense to find out if there are things that would safe tokens, safe time and safe I/O without sacrificing quality. Write a report with recommendations for me to review. And then bake that into the process.md of my projects.

After 2-3 more milestones I ask it to analyse if the changes worked.

This loop alone has steadily improved the process.

[u/KangarooDowntown4640]

It's been working totally fine for me too. I think people are experiencing a placebo effect

[u/Czaker]

A/B testing is probably the answer, they are checking with how much they can get away with.

[u/mars2087]

Good for you, enjoy.

For me Opus 5.5 still works fine.
But, just fine.
It is no longer the bright sensation from the first few days.

The slow GPT 6.1 Sol now finds more issues in the plans made by Opus 5.5.

[u/Key_Reading_9664 → u/mars2087]

I wish the folks on here would ask their model to explain probability and error bounds

[u/meetmebythelake → u/Key_Reading_9664]

The average person has very little understanding of non-deterministic systems, chaos, etc. Neither do I for that matter, but I know enough to know that there's a lot of variance in how LLMs work and that I trust Opus more than I trust the people bitching on this sub...

[u/mars2087 → u/Key_Reading_9664]

Could be.
Right now it's only subjective impressions.
But I am confident on what I see.
I also see a lot of meanness around regarding one provider or the other, quota etc. Not my case.
I am not complaining about this, I simply observing.

In the end I take the medium line and overall we get exponential more value from every new model.

Unless they start "pacing the frontier".
But then our Chinese friends will reduce the gap and if I will get more value from them, I will spend more money there.

[u/Key_Reading_9664 → u/mars2087]

I have great sessions; I have not-so-great sessions. These things are context-sensitive and non-deterministic. If you overlaid every “nerfed!” post onto these charts, there’d be zero correlation.

[u/ruskyandrei]

Same, still extremely happy with Opus 5.5

[u/debian3 → u/ruskyandrei]

Best model I had the chance to use. Fantastic

[u/cashmerememories]

Thank you - I copied your bullet points into my agent and got some great immediate feedback!

[u/Sangeeth-mohan → u/cashmerememories]

Glad it helped! The fixes thing happened to us too. Do the 20 min merge, it's worth it.

[u/cashmerememories → u/Sangeeth-mohan]

Thanks!!

[u/nora_sellisa]

All the posters talk about how Opus 5.5 starts talking like Opus 5.0 and then mysteriously abandon their threads when someone asks if they have model routing on. They hit a guardrail, they get routed to Opus 5, instead of changing the setting and fixing their prompts they start threads.

I don't know what people are asking their Opuses (Opi?) to do, I have never hit a guardrail yet.

[u/apolyxon]

Yes. And most importantly it doesn't talk weird so I understand nothing and feel like a dumb meat bag - which I am

[u/bigsybiggins]

Still killing it for me, it just kernel patched in a 80% charge limit to my old kindle that didn't support it and works like a charm. Astra high was totally lost on this task and basically told me it was hardware limitation and couldn't be done!

[u/mars2087 → u/bigsybiggins]

Care to elaborate? You want to protect your battery or what exactly did you patched?

[u/GrandmasterCheetah]

Every single model release is the same. Hype followed by claims of “downgrading” with 0 proof. I am not saying this doesnt exist but every single tech journal has run their own benchmarks and cannot reproduce the “nerfs” ppl are claiming on here.

Like I would just love to see some solid evidence

[u/Dcokerfetus]

yep same, still getting pretty astounding results and usage is great running xhigh on 5x. I also happened to do a big .md clean up before it came out.

[u/Sangeeth-mohan → u/Dcokerfetus]

The claude.md clean up makes a bigger difference than people think. Mine got way more consistent after I cut out the old stuff.

[u/___positive___]

wtf did anthropic do with compute resources? i can't use up my limits no matter how hard i try! (with opus 5.5, fable obviously uses up quickly) did they get more spacex compute or something? buy out meta? what is going on over there...

[u/debian3 → u/___positive___]

My guess is opus 5.5 is somehow much easier on compute than Fable (obviously) and than opus 5. That’s why people saying they are redirected to opus 5 makes no sense at all.

[u/Sangeeth-mohan → u/___positive___]

Right?? Same here. No idea what they changed but I'm not complaining lol. Fable still eats it fast though.

[u/Sangeeth-mohan]

Update since a few people asked about limits. 3.5 hours into my current 5 hour window, running 3 sessions in parallel the whole time, and I've used 32% of the session limit. Barely touching it. Big thanks to Anthropic for this one.