Why, though? I have half a terabyte of VRAM in cards in a datacenter and it’s absolutely not clear that anything I’ve learned using these to program or inside an app has taught me anything significant.

I talked to my friend about all the things I do to ensure my personal assistant behaves reasonably. The prompt engineering, the fake site evals, everything. And then I have Opus 5.5 do it and it doesn’t need anything. It’s simply fully aligned to performance by default.

And what did I learn anyway. Going from one model to another changes what works. And you can simply learn everything from the Chinese model in days. The whole “building skill” thing is bogus.

I have this library of techniques, a scant few of which I’ve made available on my blog, and what is reality instead: the next model blows the need for the techniques into the dust. Back on level playing field.

It’s a false god, this cultivation. Waste of time. Use the best model you can. Once you hit the guardrails move out to the other models. Even Opus 4.8 is fine. If you legitimately want to dodge the guardrails use the -cyber models.

Then move on. The library is dust.