When using max effort, I run into context compaction quite a lot. I haven't seen any increase in context window size at all over the past half year (stuck at 1M).

Are the frontier labs even working on this problem?

I noticed a big speedup in Opus 5 on Max x20 since about 10 days ago, and I feel like the model has been performing better.

It would be great to know if this was Opus 5.5 or a lesser incremental improvement, as otherwise it's difficult to judge whether Opus 5.5 is expected to be a big improvement.

It's frustrating that there isn't more transparency here.

System card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/fc1b44717c85dc068bc6ba50242199...

They purport 40% drop in costs due to lower token pricing (presumably aimed at winning back the many of us that switched providers in discovering Opus 5 unusable) and improved token efficiency.

"You're right, and it's the exact thing I flagged two turns ago and then did anyway." - Opus 5 xhigh, today.

About the time.

> For users with cybersecurity use cases that may be blocked by our cyber safeguards, we recommend accessing our models with reduced cyber blocking classifiers via our Cyber Verification Program. Claude Opus 5.5 will be available through this program in the near future.

Anthropic has used "in the near future" for Mythos-class models too, but CVP is still Opus 5 only.

Why even have the program designed for trusted access to cyber capabilities if you're not providing access to cyber capable models via the program?

It's awesome that the apt packages for claude and claude-code are out right now. I can test-drive Opus 5.5 right away. Very cool, Anthropic.

I found myself going back to Fable over and over again. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m just used to its style or it is truly more capable.

I tried Opus 5 and Astra.

I use the other 50% of my $200/mo Claude subscription by having Fable run Opus subagents for a lot of work. That way I don't have to deal with Opus directly.