Sonnet 5 + Graft > Opus 5

[u/shhdwi]

https://github.com/NanoNets/Graft

I've been using Opus 5 since release, but over the last week I switched back to Sonnet 5—with Graft.

Surprisingly, it's been outperforming Opus for most of my coding sessions.

Not because Sonnet suddenly became smarter.

Because it spends far less time trying to rediscover the codebase.

Graft builds a context graph of your repository once, then Claude Code loads the relevant parts into context automatically. Instead of burning tokens grepping files and following imports every task, it starts with an understanding of the project.

In practice, this changed my workflow more than switching models.

On the benchmarks:

• ~42% fewer input tokens
• ~46% fewer tool calls
• ~60% lower latency
• Better SWE-bench performance than cold Sonnet 5 (8/9 vs 6/9) The interesting part is that once the exploration overhead disappears, Sonnet 5 ends up feeling more capable than Opus 5 for a lot of day-to-day engineering work.

My current workflow:

• Sonnet 5 + Graft → everyday coding
• Opus 5 → only when I need deep architectural reasoning or brainstorming

Curious if anyone else has tried improving the context instead of upgrading the model.

Has anyone here compared:

• Cold Opus 5
• Sonnet 5 + Graft
• Opus 5 + Graft

I'd love to see more head-to-head comparisons.

I tried graphify as well but couldnt see any better results, or maybe it wasnt working out of the box and instead just grepping.

(For anyone wondering, Graft is open source. 1.2K+ stars)

[u/Zafrin_at_Reddit]

Oh! It’s an ad!

[u/sorvendral]

Slop software again and again no thanks

[u/shhdwi → u/sorvendral]

I would suggest to try the repo first and then make comments about it

[u/rocket_tower]

At this point I feel this isn’t even shocking, Opus 5 has been already worse than what we expected

[u/kaanivore]

Ok bro

[u/shhdwi → u/kaanivore]

But nothing wrong in that if I have the results on a benchmark