I left Claude for months. Opus 5.5 is why I'm back

I’ve been off Claude for months. Not because it got dumb, but because it got annoying. The rambling, the hedging, the preachy little disclaimers on tasks that didn’t need them. I moved most of my daily work to Codex and I didn’t miss it. Then Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5: 40% cheaper than Opus 5, faster, and with what they’re calling a fundamentally different alignment approach. I ran it for a week across real work, including four long-running agentic tasks, a full ChatPRD homepage redesign, an SVG benchmark, and one very firm refusal, and I’m ready to give you the honest verdict. There’s a lot to like. There are still two things that drive me a little crazy. And there’s one capability I genuinely wasn’t expecting.

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Uploaded Sep 22, 2026

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