This is part of why I switched to Grok 4.5
I don't need more powerful models, I need one that responds fast enough that my attention doesn't wander to other tasks. Grok 4.5 is so fast I can just use it in-band without swapping to other tasks.
Slower than Opus 4.8, which was already miserably slow, is indeed a step in the wrong direction.
for you, I am in general not constrained by the speed of models since I parallelize. For me autonomy and accuracy are paramount above all else.
After actually using for most of a day now, it really seems not just slightly slower than 4.8, but way slower. Even relatively easy code refactoring tasks seem to take a while.