I've been working with Opus 5.5 every day, probably around 10h on average, and I feel confident in saying that they did not replace anything.
I'm a bit disappointed with how this nonsense is spread across HN today.
I'm a bit disappointed with how this nonsense is spread across HN today.
Are you saying that the many, many people posting and experiencing this are wrong and you are right?
And not just in this instance, nerfing has been complained about in a cyclical fashion for many months.
But, they're all wrong?
You're so confident in your experience that you cannot think that other's experiences are also true?
"Could all these people seriously be wrong?" Yes, yes they could.
No, it gets complained about constantly even if there is no model coming out. A completely unrelated thread on Claude will feature comments like "can I just say that [model] has suddenly become useless this week?" Merely asking that question is bound to get people agreeing with you because we are evaluating all of this on vibes and placebos.
I too feel that way sometimes, I don't think it's ridiculous that Anthropic might silently downgrade you as demand warrants. But asking others if they "feel" something I feel is less than useless.
Like most experiments do not save the company money, there was an experiment to test the new fable, people got to use it at opus-5.5 usage. But this experiment clears the thinking blocks when people go back to the vanilla model; not sure if Anthropic overlooked this, but idk, it does not sound like "nerf on purpose".
There are experiments to adjust the effort level, at the moment the ones that I've seen switch to a higher effort. Again this is not a nerf; might be annoying perhaps, the model does start to behave differently (and consume more tokens). But it's not a nerf.
Then there is apparently one experiment that replaces opus-5.5 system prompt with the one from opus-4.8; the model is the same; this experiment is perhaps a bit more questionable, but still it's not "anthropic nerfed the models".
If people think they are getting nerfed they should check what experiments are enabled (claude.json and session logs).