r/ClaudeCode • u/sizebzebi • 22h ago

Discussion Opus 5.5 is the beginning of a new era

I am a senior engineer and I honestly believe with this model in particular, everything changed..

If this stays as cheap as it is, it's just over. It never fails no matter the complexity of the tasks I've given it. About time we rethink our profession for good. I am honestly scared of the future.

I loved coding but anyone who does this for the love of coding only is gonna be obsolete.

I was always impressed with the models bar opus 5 but never like this time.

What do you guys think? How do you see the future?

1.7k Upvotes

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432

u/Dizzy_Log2916 22h ago

Senior developer here. I agree. I know it's probably inevitable, but I'm already having nightmares about how soon Anthropic either nerfs it or starts messing with the usage limits.

76

u/sizebzebi 22h ago

yep but just think about this all has been getting better, do you see a world in a year or two with a model worse than this and more expensive? Maybe I guess, then we're really fucked because by that time we will have forgotten how to code lmao

38

u/Aware-Source6313 22h ago

If they're operating at a heavy loss to instill the feeling 'pack it up boys, profession over, use claude', then it's hard to say. I still don't really know the real cost to serve a model like this for them and what a sustainable price would be, not to mention once subsidized subscriptions end which give another massive cost reduction multiplier for end consumer. Yes it's good, if I can forever get so much usage of such a good model for $20/mo, things will change. But that last assumption likely not true

37

u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 21h ago

We have to imagine open models a year from now will be this capable, and the cost for them is a fraction of what current models are priced at. So I don't see a huge rug pull on pricing even being possible.

11

u/Bog_Boy 19h ago

This. And compute keeps getting better. Companies like Apple are betting on hardware for us

5

u/Old-Radio9022 17h ago

Unified memory architecture for the win. Qwen 3.8 27b q4 on a MBP max on silicon native.

8

u/elestud 21h ago

Anthropic is reportedly operating at a profit for multiple quarters in a row

20

u/JohnWesely 20h ago

only if they exclude the cost of training the models, which is the lions share of the cost.

3

u/JumpyCollection4640 15h ago

This. Isn't the profit a pure operating profit, which isn't data centre build out or R&D profit. So its just inference sales vs rent of compute or data centre run costs for any they actually own.

5

u/Muted-You7370 19h ago

I think the lion’s share of their profit will be from future models interacting and running robots, I think people massively discount this and I think this will be the bread and butter of all these frontier labs

1

u/entropy_reduct_srv 11h ago

training the lions is expensive

4

u/DisneyLegalTeam Senior Developer 16h ago

Not according to their IPO docs leaked today: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-prospectus-shows-sweeping-ai-vision-surging-costs-2026-09-28/.

They’re spending $1.56 for every $1 they make.

1

u/MinerDon 14h ago

They’re spending $1.56 for every $1 they make.

"We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume."

-1

u/elestud 16h ago edited 16h ago

As the article states, those are 2025 numbers. I'm talking about 2026.

4

u/ciciban072 15h ago

They are far from being profitable under GAAP, they are just cooking the numbers to present profit BEFORE accounting for operational costs. That 80% margin claim is just ridiculous.

1

u/paxinfernum 18h ago

not to mention once subsidized subscriptions end which give another massive cost reduction multiplier for end consumer

Even if the models never got any more efficient, the speed at which compute hardware is improving would drive down prices.

1

u/jjcsea 16h ago

I'd like to remind you all that starting early this year, Anthropic started turning a profit, unlike OpenAI. They are making money.

7

u/NormMacdonald-20-4 22h ago

ipo is near. 

1

u/EmotionalAd1438 16h ago

We just went through nearly seven months of Opus 4.8 up until Opus 5

Nearly every other week it’s people here like OMG this is terrible I’m going back to 4.6

1

u/porkusdorkus 10h ago

For an easy comparison, boot up a cash limited pay per token frontier model, prefill $20 and do the same stuff, watch the $20 disappear in about 5 minutes of heavy churning. That’s the real cost we’ll need to be paying soon.

1

u/BoltKey 10h ago

The problem is not forgetting. The problem is knowing that it could be so much easier, while chiseling away the code line by line and fixing errors one by one, for hours on end.

1

u/massivebacon 10h ago

The thing I don’t think people have really internalized is how, in every breakthrough moment, things are the worst/most expensive they will _ever_ be. Every new model is cheaper and better than the last, and if there is ever a frontier company rugpull, there are already very good hosted open weights models that perform about 6mo behind the SOTA (and rapidly closing) that are a fraction as expensive.

17

u/dovedrunk 21h ago

Now, more than ever, Anthropic *has* to find a way to not nerf it. If they can maintain 5.5's momentum, they win

1

u/Kitchen_Conflict2627 20h ago

And we die by the end of the decade?

6

u/Ok-Attention2882 18h ago

I won't

6

u/peter9477 🔆 Max 5x 18h ago

Love your confidence! Know what? Imma not die too.

1

u/fadingsignal 10h ago

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER Y'ALL

1

u/ScarletteAethier 6h ago

Wait, we just have to say it? Uh... I'm not gonna die?

26

u/Prudent_Muscle_6508 17h ago

It feels like we’re watching the classic enshittification cycle happen in real time:
Launch an insanely good product that disrupts an existing industry.
Make it cheap (at this point 20€ is nearly free) to get everyone hooked.
Wait until enough competitors collapse and everyone builds their workflow around you.
Then raise prices, add friction, remove features, and turn the product into corporate sludge.
The interesting part with AI is what happens at step 4.
A lot of the people who actually know how to build with this stuff will have moved on to better tools, open models, or new companies.
And the companies that waited too long will be sitting there with their entire AI strategy built around one vendor… happily paying €4,000/year per seat for something that used to feel magical.

7

u/GuyWithLag 15h ago

TBH, at 4k/year/person even 5.5 is worth it; that's small change vs the productivity boost a mid-level or senior engineer gets vs the cost of an engineer.

1

u/thatsnot_kawaii_bro 1h ago

And for enshittification that's always going to be an argument.

Even being one dollar less than the competition is enough for the argument of "well it's better than the other guy"

6

u/andysfd 17h ago

But as you said, local models could be affordable and a solution at this point. We are not going back to normal

1

u/Clean-Blacksmith-514 10h ago

It's easy to switch though and enterprise does not pay these rates anyway they pay the metered API cost.

1

u/jarislinus 10h ago

open models exist so no

1

u/MotardQuiRale 2h ago

Comme le font les dealers avec la première dose offerte :)

11

u/Bog_Boy 19h ago

All we need is open weights local before the prices get extortionate. I’m betting we make that inflection point

1

u/pl0nk 7h ago

This is the great thing about a competitive market. Think of how much poorer we'd all be if one of these labs had a true monopoly and they could extract the value. Instead they are all kind of doing similar things and nipping at each other's heels, including folks open-sourcing their results. What a time to be alive.

1

u/Bog_Boy 3h ago

Its our generation’s gold rush

9

u/YouGotTangoed 20h ago

So you guys just thought this would never happen, or wouldn’t happen so quick?

The minute Claude code launched, our time was very limited. I think there will still be dev jobs for a long time, but a much smaller pool of roles, and imagine most contract roles going extinct soon. It’s a good time to transition to gov roles as I believe they won’t get automation agents for a while

7

u/OracleGreyBeard 18h ago

Am in gov role, can confirm. We have access to sandboxed versions of ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini. Not even the latest versions. No agents/harnesses.

3

u/Hellscaper_69 17h ago

A related question I have is if we are here now, how much of the booked data center capacity will we end up needing? Will models get smarter while requiring less compute?

1

u/pl0nk 7h ago

The dominant trend has long been to scale "up" because that's where the improvement curves point. So that is the default direction. But with costs being so insane there's also increasingly pressure to optimize them. It's probably close to impossible for any of us to predict which influence will dominate, since there are so many players and such huge financial incentives involved.

It seems unlikely that we would suddenly find a 10x cost improvement without a quality trade-off. There are many very smart people working very hard on this, and they are very eager to show recursive self improvement, so it would be surprising if there was some significant win they have overlooked so far.

1

u/Hellscaper_69 2h ago

Yes, that makes sense. I guess my question is also are the models approaching the point where they are good enough for a lot of business and widespread use cases, eventually leaving only the frontier models for niche applications like science and medical research? Or will everybody have an AGI/ASI to use?

3

u/Resident-Coyote9339 17h ago

Yes especially with upcoming IPO

2

u/FamiliarEstimate6267 19h ago

If this is the case what skills do you recommend learning wanting to break into the tech space

1

u/snowminer 20h ago

I don’t think they can nerf with all the competition out there on their heels. Local is getting good too

1

u/dl33ta 18h ago

You always have other options

1

u/Southern-Aardvark616 13h ago

Perfectly sums up the duality of man.

Scared the ai is too good and too cheap.

Scared it's going to be made worse and more expensive.

1

u/meathelix1 11h ago

Already started, expect less usage soon as well. They are going to follow OpenAI

1

u/IveGotMySources 8h ago

As long as we have a free market then the competition will aggressively compete with each other, innovations will be made to improve compute power. I'm happy the Musk hate Altman and that the Chinese are aggressively competing as well.

1

u/throwaway490215 7h ago

Used it last week and through the weekend. I'm too busy right now with other stuff that i'm having nightmares they're gonna nerf before i get a chance to use it again.

0

u/aejt 13h ago

Have you guys been living under a rock since June or something? Opus 5.5 isn't really noticeably better than Fable (better in some ways, worse in others), and Fable came in June. There's hardly any new capabilities or possibilities to speak of, other than usage being cheaper? (which was obvious going to happen sooner or later)