I just asked Claude about defaulting to 4.6 and there are several options. I might go back to that as default and use --model claude-opus-4-7 as needed. The token inflation is very real.
I cobbled my own together one night before I came across the thoughtfully-built KeyVox and got to talking shop with its creator. Our cups runneth over. https://github.com/macmixing/keyvox/
I have an M2 Air 24GB/1TB that has been such a beast that I haven't touched my 16" Pro in months. I have four browsers running, with a ton of tabs in Brave (daily driver) and I'm sitting at 21/24GB utilization with all sorts of apps running (granted, Docker is not at the moment, but it still doesn't make it sweat). I had ~8 pro laptops in a row going back to the late 2000s, but Apple Silicon has changed how I work. A future 14" OLED that was similarly light might turn my head, but if I had to replace it today I'd just buy another M5 Air with at least this much RAM. [FYI I never installed Chrome after M1 came out. Brave has been rock-solid for over a half-decade now.]
Well I'm astounded. I talked to it for 13min, it crashed, but remembered the context when I returned a few minutes later and talked for a full 30min (it's limit).
It 99.9% felt like it performed at the level of Samantha in the movie Her.
I started asking all kinds of questions about how it worked and it mentioned a word I had to have it repeat because I hadn't heard it before: PROSODY (linguistics) — the study of elements of speech, including intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: vowels and consonants.
I asked about personality settings, à la TARS from Interstellar, and it said it automatically tailored responses by listening for tone and content.
It felt like the most "the future's here but not evenly distributed" interaction I've had since multi-touch on an original iPhone.