It is entirely due to Opus 4.5 being an inflection point codingwise over previous LLMs. Most of the buzz there has been organic word of mouth due to how strong it is.
Opus 4.5 is expensive to put it mildly, which makes Claude Code more compelling. But even now, token providers like Openrouter have Opus 4.5 as one of its most popular models despite the price.
The real annoying thing about Opus 4.5 is that it's impossible to publicly say "Opus 4.5 is an order of magnitude better than coding LLMs released just months before it" without sounding like a AI hype booster clickbaiting, but it's the counterintuitive truth, to my personal frustration.
I have been trying to break this damn model since its November release by giving it complex and seemingly impossible coding tasks but this asshole keeps doing them correctly. GPT-5.3-Codex has been the same relative to GPT-5.2-Codex, which just makes me even more frustrated.
It strains belief that anyone working on a moderate to large project would not have hit the edge cases and issues. Every other day I discover and have to fix a bug that was introduced by Claude/Codex previously (something implement just slightly incorrect or with just a slightly wrong expectation).
Every engineer I know working "mid-to-hard" problems (FANG and FANG adjacent) has broken every LLM including Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT-5.2-Codex on routine tasks. Granted the models have a very high success rate nowadays but they fail in strange ways and if you're well versed in your domain, these are easy to spot.
Granted I guess if you're just saying "build this" and using "it runs and looks fine" as the benchmark then OK.
All this is not to say Opus 4.5/6 are bad, not by a long shot, but your statement is difficult to parse as someone who's been coding a very long time and uses these agents daily. They're awesome but myopic.
CC confidently iterated until it discovered the issue. CC confidently communicated exactly what the bug was, a detailed step-by-step deep dive into all the sections of the code that contributed to it. CC confidently suggested a fix that it then implemented. CC declared victory after 10 minutes!
The bug was still there.
I’m willing to admit I might be “holding it wrong”. I’ve had some successes and failures.
It’s all very impressive, but I still have yet to see how people are consistently getting CC to work for hours on end to produce good work. That still feels far fetched to me.
Also, "order of magnitude better" is such plainly obvious exaggeration it does call your objectivity into question about Opus 4.5 vs. previous models and/or the competition.
But I have to give it to Amodei and his goons in the media, their marketing is top notch. Fear-mongering targeted to normies about the model knowing it is being evaluated and other sort of preaching to the developers.
Why would you even watch a YouTube video with ads?
There are ad blockers, sponsor segment blockers, etc. If you use them, it will block almost every kind of YouTube ad.
One day I visited DistroWatch.com. The site deliberately tweaked its images so ad blockers would block some "good" images. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on. The site freely admitted what it was doing. The site's point was: you're looking at my site, which I provide for free, yet you block the thing that lets me pay for the site?
I stopped using ad blockers after that. If a site has content worth paying for, I pay. If it is a horrible ad-infested hole, I don't visit it at all. Otherwise, I load ads.
Which overall means I pay for more things and visit less crap things and just visit less things period. Which is good.
not even joking
Modern advertisement is malware.
An ad-blocker /is/ security software. You don’t have to take it from me, you can read from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
> AT-A-GLANCE RECOMMENDATIONS
> Standardize and Secure Web Browsers
> Deploy Advertisement Blocking Software
> Isolate Web Browsers from Operating Systems
> Implement Protective Domain Name System Technologies
Literally their second recommendation on this pamphlet about securing web browsers: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Capaci...
Moreover you don’t even need a 0-day to fall for phishing. All you need is to be a little tired or somehow not paying attention (inb4 “it will never happen to ME, I am too smart for that”)
Use the pi coding agent. Bare-bones context, easy to hack.
Yesterday "I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using Claude at work that I would gladly pay $1,500-$2,000 per month to keep using it."
Thanks for that, and it's worth nothing FYI.
LLMs are probably the most impressive machine made in recorded human existence. Will there be a better machine? I'm 100% confident there will be, but this is without a doubt extremely valuable for a wide array of fields, including software development. Anyone claiming otherwise is just pretending at this point, maybe out of fear and/or hope, but it's a distorted view of reality.
By this do you mean there isn't much more room for future improvement, or that you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development? I think the latter is hard position to defend, speaking as a user of it. I am definitely more productive with it now, although I'm not sure I enjoy software development as much anymore (but that is a different topic)
I don't expect that LLM technology will improve in a way that makes it significantly better . I think the training pool is poisoned, and I suspect that the large AI labs have been cooking the benchmark data for years to suspect that their models are improving more quickly than they are in reality.
That being said, I'm sure some company will figure out new strategies for deploying LLMs that will cause a significant improvement.
But I don't expect that improvements are going to come from increased training.
> [Do] you feel it is not useful in its current form for software development?
IME using LLMs for software development corrodes my intuitive understanding of an enterprise codebase.
Since the advent of LLMs, I've been asked to review many sloppy 500+/1000+ line spam PRs written by arrogant Kool-Aid drinking coworkers. If someone is convinced that Claude Code is AGI, they won't hesitate to drop a slop bomb on you.
Basically I feel that coding using LLMs degrades my understanding of what I'm working on and enables coworkers to dominate my day with spam code review requests.
I feel you there, I definitely notice that. I find I can output high quality software with it (if I control the design and planning, and iterate), but I lack that intuitive feel I get about how it all works in practice. Especially noticeable when debugging; I have fewer "Oh! I bet I know what is going on!" eureka moments.
It seems so gross.
But I guess with all of the trillions of investor dollars being dumped into the businesses, it would be irresponsible to not run guerrilla PR campaigns
I think this takes away from the main thrust of your argument which is the marketing campaign and to me makes you seem conspiratorial minded. LLMs can be both useful and also mass astroturfing can be happening.
Personally I have witnessed non coders (people who can code a little but have not done any professional software building) like my spouse do some pretty amazing things. So I don’t think it’s useless.
It can be all of:
1. It’s useful for coding
2. There’s mass social media astroturfing happening
3. There’s a massive social overhype train that should be viewed skeptically
4. Theres some genuine word of mouth and developer demand to try the latest models out of curiosity, with some driven by the hype train and irrational exuberance and some by fear for their livelihoods.
IN MY GENUINELY HELD OPINION, LLMs generate shit code and the people who disagree don't know what good code looks like.
Yes they are. This is true.
> which is a time consuming and tedious part of programming.
In my experience, this is a tedious part of programming which I do not spend very much time on.
In my experience LLM generated API boilerplate is acceptable, yet still sloppier than anything I would write by hand.
In my experience LLMs are quite bad at generating essentially every other type of code, especially if you are not generating JS/TS or HTML/CSS.