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by enraged_camel 101 days ago
>> November 2024 through February 2026

Yeah, listen... I'm glad these types of studies are being conducted. I'll say this though: the difference between pre- and post-Opus 4.5 has been night and day for me.

From August 2025 through November 2025 I led a complex project at work where I used Sonnet 4.5 heavily. It was very helpful, but my total productivity gains were around 10-15%, which is pretty much what the study found. Once Opus came out in November though, it was like someone flipped a switch. It was much more capable at autonomous work and required way less hand-holding, intervention or course-correction. 4.6 has been even better.

So I'm much more interested in reading studies like this over the next two years where the start period coincides with Opus 4.5's release.

3 comments

> It was very helpful, but my total productivity gains were around 10-15%, which is pretty much what the study found. Once Opus came out in November though, it was like someone flipped a switch. It was much more capable at autonomous work and required way less hand-holding, intervention or course-correction. 4.6 has been even better.

How did you track these gains?

I swear people say this with every single model and release version, without fail.
Very much agree. Gave a presentation on AI to a group earlier this week and I spent a third of the time talking about the Opus 4.5 inflection point in AI history. First time using that model the day it was released it was so clear that it knew what it was doing at a different level. People still jump around to different models or tools or time frames when talking about AI and usefulness, but those have no meaning if they’re not using the Opus 4.5 and 4.6 models and anthropic harnesses of Claude code or cowork.

I’m interested in the studies along with the history of AI and if they’re going to realize that was the point when things changed, because for us devs, that was the moment.

Would you mind sharing the presentation? Or an AI summary of it.
I gave a similar presentation in January which covers the AI features that emerged in 2025 that culminated in the step-function in capability in Nov'25 and where I went from there.... (certainly my GitHub activity is bright green since)

The presentation was created with Claude Code to prove itself; never going back to Keynote/PowerPoint. Press 'X' key to disable "safe mode". Prompts are in the repo.

https://neomantra.github.io/presentations/GolangMeetupJan202...