Just paid the "forgot to cancel" tax on my Codex sub. ๐ธ
The crazy part? With Opus 5.5, I literally have zero reason to open it. Frontier models are eating specialized coding tools alive right now.
The capability moat is shrinking fast. ๐ฆซ
Haiku 5.5 is officially out.
Higher intelligence, lower latency. RIP to everyone who just finished optimizing their prompts for the previous generation. ๐ซก
Whatโs the first thing you are building or testing with it?
Anthropic has been shipping fast with the 5.5 family, but Fable 5.5 is still MIA. Given the recent leaks and stealth testing, a launch feels imminent. Anyone got alpha on the exact release date? ๐๐ค
@NeelNanda5 Personalised is the right word for it. A few prompts and Opus 5.5 built me a browser synth with 100 presets, then made its own intro video.
You can now mod Claude Code:
- Change how it behaves
- Customize the UI
- Swap in your own features
Write one with a few lines of TypeScript, or have Claude build it for you. Mods ship inside plugins, so you install them with /plugin in the CLI or desktop app.
A few examples:
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:
Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:
Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:
Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:
Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!
In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.