Opus 4.5 was a massive step change in capability for sure. The opinions of anyone who hasn't bothered experimenting with these things post-Opus-4.5 are not worth a damn.

They still are far from perfect but they're massively helpful.

I had a bit of this impression when reading the post as well as the authors' product website. A lot of it does seem to be stuck in 2025.

For instance I think their post "long-context isn't the answer" on their website post straight-up isn't accurate, and gives me the impression they are just extrapolating previous performance to new models. In my experience, Opus 4.6 and newer have worked very reliably for long context to me (i don't perceive any intelligence drop at 700-900K tokens). Yeah it's extremely cost-inefficient, but it works.

my perhaps controversial take is that opus 4.1 was smarter than 4.5 for complex engineering work, but 4.5 was faster and "squishier" - it responded better to simpler prompts, it read between the lines of user input better, and that this was really important to converting new users quickly

Did you even read further on? The section right after that addresses the step changes in current frontier models https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...