alt Hacker NewsHave the models become significantly more capable in the last 6 months? I'm not convinced we're still seeing massive improvements as we saw at the start. The output certainly isn't getting better, the software these companies produce is actually pretty buggy.
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For me personally? yes absoluttly.
Opus 5 vs. 5.5 is a clear stepup.
Problem is, you need to do a diverse set of experiments to recognize it. Blender support got relevant better,t he amount of corrections got less etc.
Yes, without a question. Fable 5 and Opus 5.5 are a step-change above what we had before. On the open-weights side, GLM 5.3, DeepSeek 4.1 v1017, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next are all significantly more capable in basically any task you can give them.
You can now have a model work on a task non-stop for a day or more. This was unthinkable 12 months ago, and unstable 6 months ago.
If you are searching for evidence of capability, just look at the amount of projects, blog posts and videos on game remixes, hardware reverse engineering, new compilers and runtimes that has started coming out in the last 6 months. Slop? Sure, but this kind of slop didn't exist at this level 6 or 12 months ago.
I took a six month break from AI coding after leaving my startup and just restarted this week. I feel like Opus 5.5 is a step function improvement from 4.5 or 5, which I built a large codebase with.
Opus 5.5 is capable of completing very long running tasks and managing many threads of work with subagents without getting confused in a way that simply wasn't possible before.