ok i've used opus 5.5 enough now to have an informed opinion and i just want to say - hallelujah!!! opus 5.5 solved SO MANY problems. let me list them below in increasing importance 1. verbosity is now used more appropriately i still see long responses, but only when it's justified. there's much less fluffy "claude speak". it's now mostly real talk 2. the behavioral problems in opus 5 are fixed i haven't got a single "honest mistake" yet. unlike opus 5 which likes to jump into conclusion, make a wrong move, and then admit its problem and take more turns to fix it, 5.5 just does the right thing it also does it FAST - this made a visible difference when using as firstmate, and was one of the reasons i really liked grok. now i would say opus 5.5 is on par here 3. MOST IMPORTANT - cost i can now finally ignore the 50% cap on fable, and fully utilize the subscription value with just opus for pretty much everything i still find myself wanting fable for some ambiguous, creative prototyping work where i kind of want to say "surprise me". i tried opus for one of those things earlier and it didn't surprise me.. but for literally everything else, 5.5 is just nailing them without a miss so far. so for the first time in a long time, i finally stopped using opus 4.8 as my firstmate & all my second mates, and switched that to opus 5.5 overall, very impressed - now i know anthropic did know opus 5 was bad despite not willing to acknowledge it. :) they knew exactly what to fix, and they got the job done