Sep 22, 2026 · 25 min
Claire Vo tests whether Opus 5.5 fixes Claude’s worst habits
I left Claude for months. Opus 5.5 is why I'm back
The episode examines whether a newer model can overcome the verbosity, hedging, and preachiness that drove an experienced user away from Claude.
- 1Opus 5.5 shows meaningful gains across cost, speed, writing, prototyping, SVG creation, and video workflows.
- 2Long-running agentic work improves, but persistent frustrations keep Claude from becoming a clear all-purpose replacement.
- 3Codex remains superior in several engineering workflows, making model choice depend on the task rather than brand loyalty.
Don't miss
Claire Vo’s real-world testing finds Opus 5.5 substantially improved, yet still unable to displace Codex across every engineering workflow.
The brief
Claire Vo explains why she abandoned Claude: intelligent answers had become rambling, hedged, preachy, and frustrating enough to earn her label “Claude slop.”
She returns to test Opus 5.5 against real-world work, weighing cost and speed alongside the less measurable question of whether its output is actually less annoying.
The evaluation spans long-running agentic tasks, frontend prototyping, writing, SVG creation, and video workflows, giving the model room to succeed or fail beyond a single prompt.
Opus 5.5 delivers major improvements, but the episode does not turn into a clean comeback story: persistent frustrations remain, and Codex is still better in clear areas.
The broader takeaway is practical rather than tribal: Claude’s return depends on the task, because stronger general performance does not erase meaningful workflow-specific tradeoffs.
Claude
AnthropicListen to the full episode and explore every guest, topic, and moment on PodLume.