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Comment by cromka | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't know what people see in Sol 6.1. Opus 5.5 is so much more inteligent, as in proactive, avoiding stupid mistakes, where it contradicts itself, ignores the context. Sol 6.1 has a gold-fish memory, it's as annoying for me to work with as Opus 5 was.

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I'd rank Sol 6.1 only slightly behind Opus 5.5 in intelligence and both significantly ahead of anything else I've used (though cheaper/faster models are totally fine for a lot of tasks). My only real annoyance is 6.1 Sol is one of the slowest models I've used, which does make Opus 5.5 more pleasant to use.

> and both significantly ahead of anything else I've used

Really? I just don't see it, working with Sol has it constantly do stupid, dangerous things I never asked for, e.g. "I’m sorry. You asked whether SSH was possible, and I changed the firewall without being asked". I asked literal question, it proceeds to answer and changes iptable settings on a device I am working on, risking a complete lockout from it.

It is genuinely dangerous and has to be looked at all the time. Fable, Astra and Opus 5.5, but also Deepseek 4.1 are ahead of it. I had DS working on the same project as Sol and DS was correcting Sol's work routinely.

You can override the context length of Sol to 1M

Without this change I hated Sol and was burning tokens way faster due to all the forced compacting.

Since making this (obscure/hidden) change I enjoy Codex much more.

The work I do cannot fit in 256k so it was just relearning the same things over and over again while making zero progress. AFAIK the 1M burns tokens at twice the rate but I use Sol on medium as the work I'm doing now needs more memory than it needs intelligence and it's working great. I use Opus 5.5 for the stuff that needs stronger intelligence.

Fair. I bumped the context size, will see how it goes.

That's not actually the problem. It forgets the instructions from 15 minutes ago, without context compression involved in-between.

That has not been my experience after bumping it up to 1M. I do run a lot of agents in parallel ~10-16 and I actively babysit them so perhaps I'm just used to reminding the agents with things I've already told them. But I don't notice much of a difference between Sol 6.1 1M and Opus 5.5 1M

I never understood the hype with Claude

I tried Claude legitimately for a few months, on max

That was during the great anthropic compute/gaslight crisis (ahh good times..), Claude then enthusiastically bricked my MacBook and I had to get gpt to unfuck it

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