That was their headline for Opus 4.8, I guess the invested into some post-training to get them to write this, and I like it, it's a great way to identify AI posts from Claude.
If I had coworkers with the ability to program like Sonnet 3.7 did, I'd be extremely happy. In reality, I can probably count 1-3 people like that, out of many over the years. Honestly, pair programming with Opus is better than any pair programming I had with a human, especially at understanding the reasons behind my designs.
As much as I hate to say this, I think it is an user error. Fable is very to the point, much more so than any other Anthropic model. I found it to be cheaper to use Fable, than using Opus for same task, but in order to achieve that, it needs to be given a targeted task.
I considered Opus 4.5 to be the peak for a while. Opus 4.6 tended to over think, and generally get lost in thinking. I asked something and Claude Code would just spin for 15 minutes. And it was not the harness, if I changed the model to 4.5, it was fine again. So I skipped the following releases. I've been working with Opus 4.8 the last weeks and while I don't like how talkative it is, but it is fine to work with interactively. I've also used Fable for the few days it was available, and indeed, that was model worth using for my use case. To the point, but still very interactive.
Zig has multiple issues, but syntax is definitely not it. It might take a little bit of time getting used to, if you are coming from another language, but it's one of the most readable languages I've ever worked with.
I was never able to get these models to collaborate with me the way Opus does. I'm probably an outliner, I don't one-shot projects, I don't vibe code. I basically use LLMs are if I was working with a coworker, fairly smart one, but with short memory and often missing the big picture. Sometimes I can delegate more, sometimes less, but I know I always have to stay on top of what's happening, because it WILL create mess when it hits something hard. With the Antropic models, this kind of cooperation is easy (with the exception of Opus 4.6, which was bad for some reason).
I don't have an example, but I know the pattern. You are working on your software, security researcher finds a bug, it's in your project, for you it's just another bug, but for them it's a point on their CV, so they make a theater about it, and expect priority in dealing with it. It must get tiring if you get many of these.
I feel that Zig will stay a niche language. In this world, there is no reason for corporations to use anything but Rust for this kind of code. And without the corporate push, it will probably still exist for a long time, but the D trajectory is what I predict. I really like the language and I hope it gets more popular, but it seems unlikely to me.
With the amount of problems I had using Redis Sentinel, I really wish there was another way. On multiple occasions, with completely different deployments, it got itself into a non-repairable state where the only option was to drop it and setup the replicas manually. I was hoping someone would do a Patroni-like project for Redis, but I've not found it yet. I've moved all persistent data to PostgreSQL and use a number of Valkeys behind Envoy proxy as a cache.
Well, I'm just an extremely happy user. I've honestly tried to find an alternative, and couldn't. I'm using it in the context of solo developer and it provides a huge value to me.
It's actually common, many companies develop their products this way. The source is available, you can see the VCS, but you can't participate in the development. That's why I see this as signal that it's going to turn into a company.
What made open source great, is the fact that if you find a problem, you can patch it. It's what motivated me, anyway. Ladybird is not SQLite, it's under development and very likely will be forever. To me it looks like they are transitioning into a company, where this model makes sense.
Indeed, while there is communication that the situation with merging external pull requests should improve, the reality is that it's easier to land a patch in Linux, than in Zig.
I wonder how can a new browser engine survive with the source available model. Like, why would anyone support this, unless they have business association with the Ladybird developers?
I've tried many AI code review tools. Nothing comes close to the depth of CodeRabbit reviews. It's the only such tool that can find real logical bugs. I'd love to be able to get Claude Code to do similar quality of review, but I can't get it right, no matter how I try.