alt Hacker NewsHacker News strongly believes Opus 4.5 is the defacto standard and China was consistently 8+ month behind. Curious how this performs. It’ll be a big inflection point if it performs as well as its benchmarks.
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In my experience GPT-5.2 with extra-high thinking is consistently a bit better and significantly cheaper (even when I use the Fast version which is 2x the price in Cursor).
The HN obsession with Claude Code might be a bit biased by people trying to justify their expensive subscriptions to themselves.
However, Opus 4.5 is much faster and very high quality too, and that ends up mattering more in practice. I end up using it much more and paying a dear but worthwhile price for it.
PS: Despite what the benchmarks say, I find Gemini 3 Pro and Flash to be a step below Claude and GPT, although still great compared to the state-of-the-art last year, and very fast and cheap. Gemini also seems to have a less AI sounding writing-style.
I am aware this is all quite vague and anecdotal, just my two cents.
I do think these kinds of opinions are valuable. Benchmarks are a useful reference, but they do give the illusion of certainty to something that is fundamentally much harder to measure and quite subjective.
Based on their own published benchmarks, it appears that this model is at least 6 months behind.