I’m on the $100/month plan. 1-2 prompts in I got my limit on Opus, then I spend most of my coding day on Sonnet.

Whenever I am on Opus, it isn’t obvious it’s writing code that Sonnet can’t. I see a bigger difference between prompts that do vs. do not have “ultrathink” rather than Sonnet/Opus.

Does anyone with more experience have a clear perspective on Sonnet vs Opus? Even on the benchmarks they are about the same.

I heard people prefer Opus over Sonnet in Claude Code, is this true? I’ve been using Sonnet for the past two weeks and it works great, but gets things wrong sometimes? Is Opus any better?

I’m seeing a lot of discussion about using Opus to plan and sonnet to code.

What is the main difference between the two on coding tasks?

I work in quantitative finance, so most of my programming revolves around building financial tools that detect and exploit market anomalies. The coding I do is highly theoretical and often based on insights from academic finance research.

I’m currently exploring different models to help me reason through and validate my approaches. Does anyone have experience using Opus 4 of Sonnet 4 for this kind of work? I’m trying to figure out what is the best fit for my use case.

I’m a pro user and trying to understand the hype around Claude max.

I find Claude code to be good using sonnet, but the way people speak about Claude max seems to not match my experience. On benchmarks and other AI apps I haven’t noticed a massive difference between opus and sonnet quality.

Is it different in Claude code?

I've been playing with the free version giving iy some requirements and testing the code it produces. While it's pretty cool to see it understand the requirements and produce ok code, i have to go thru a lot of iterations to get it to what i expect.

I wonder if Opus is significantly "smarter" when writing software based on vague'isg requirements. Please share your experience.

Hey everyone, I've been using Claude 3.7 Sonnet for coding projects and now via Claude Code with a MAX subscription, but notice it still tends to over-engineer solutions and ignores explicit instructions to keep things simple (KISS, DRY, YAGNI, etc.) in my CLAUDE.md, prompts, and project instructions in Claude Desktop/Claude.ai.

I always forget Opus exists, and am wondering if anyone has any input on Opus vs. Sonnet 3.7 for coding and math?

Thanks for your suggestions!

Note: I’ve developed what I feel should be the perfect instructions and memory for Sonnet 3.7 to follow but it still needs to constantly be corrected and reminded.

How are people genuinely praising Claude Code Sonnet 4.5? I have no idea what’s happening…but from my experience it’s pretty disappointing. Sorry if that stings, but I’m honestly curious about what others see in it.

I’m speaking as someone who uses Claude Code daily easily 7+ hours per day and who has been deeply involved with it since the beginning. I consider myself a power user and truly understand the capabilities it should have. Maybe I’m missing something crucial here…but BESIDES that point I’m really dissatisfied and frustrated with Anthropic right now.

On top of that, the marketing hype around Sonnet 4.5 feels like the same garbage AI slot promotion we saw everywhere with ChatGPT lol. It’s being marketed as the “best model in the world,” likely to people who barely even scratch its surface.

I’ve also just hit a usage limit on Opus 4.1. I’m on the max 200 plan and now there’s some kind of cap in place…for what, a week? Why? If Sonnet is sooooo good why are they placing weekly limits on opus 4.1? So stupid. Can someone explain what’s going on here?

I had a subscription last with claude opus last May and did not renew after. That was before Sonnet 3.5 was released, right now I am using it on coding and surprisingly it was better than opus when I used opus last May. Question, is it really better than opus in coding or opus also got upgraded same as sonnet? I am in dillema if I am going to subscribe again or not.

Curious to know what is other's experience using these models? I feel like even with Max plan, i am forced to use Sonnet 4.5 - but holy fuck it's stupid compared to Opus 4.1, it's a fucking moron, cute and funny one, but its IQ can't be above 70. Nevertheless, at least he's a great little coder, when u tell it what to do and test its results comprehensively.

Do you use Opus or Sonnet, and why? Any tips/tricks that makes Sonnet smarter?

I've been using fully Claude Opus 4.1 in my terminal setup for coding, reasoning, and agent-like tasks. it's been solid for complex workflows. But now that Sonnet 4.5 is out, I'm wondering if I should switch. From benchmarks, it seems to match or beat Opus in areas like coding (higher scores on SWE-Bench and agentic tasks), visual reasoning, and handling nuanced instructions with better efficiency for iterative sessions. If you've tried both in a CLI/terminal environment, what's your take? Does Sonnet hold up for deep reasoning and long-chain planning, or does Opus still edge it out there?

For complex workflows, would you recommend switching? Experiences appreciated!

I've heard that Opus allucinates more. I know that the basic idea here is to have reasoning in both models, but which one is better for coding today?

To all Max users. What is the difference in capability between Sonnet vs Opus? Because benchmarks alone aren’t really saying that opus is better than sonnet. But I wonder what it feels like in Claude code. Is opus better with complex tasks and has it been able to do things that sonnet wasn’t capable of? If so what are criteria that makes you use sonnet or opus? Thank you.

Source: Code with Claude Opening Keynote

I love Claude Code, but I've hit a ceiling. I'm on the Max 20 plan ($200/month) and I keep burning through my weekly Opus allowance in a single day, even when I'm careful. If you're doing real work in a large repo, that's not workable.

For context: I've been a SWE for 15+ years and work on complex financial codebases. Claude is part of my day now and I only use it for coding.

Sonnet 4.5 has better benchmark scores, but on large codebases seen in the industry it performs poorly. Opus is the only model that can actually reason about large, interconnected codebases.

I've spent a couple dozen hours optimising my prompts to manage context and keep Opus usage to a minimum. I've built a library of Sonnet prompts & sub-agents which:

• Search through and synthesise information from tickets

• Locate related documentation

• Perform web searchers

• Search the codebase for files, patterns & conventions

• Analyse code & extract intent

All of the above is performed by Sonnet. Opus only comes in to synthesise the work into an implementation plan. The actual implementation is performed by Sonnet to keep Opus usage to a minimum.

Yet even with this minimal use I hit my weekly Opus limits after a normal workday. That's with me working on a single codebase with a single claude code session (nothing in parallel).

I'm not spamming prompts or asking it to build games from scratch. I've done the hard work to optimise for efficiency, yet the model that actually understands my work is barely usable.

If CC is meant for professional developers, there needs to be a way to use Opus at scale. Either higher Opus limits on the Max 20 plan or an Opus-heavy plan.

Anyone else hitting this wall? How are you managing your Opus usage?

(FYI I'm not selling or offering anything. If you want the prompts I spoke about they're free on this github repo with 6k stars. I have no affiliation with them)

TLDR: Despite only using Opus for research & planning, I hit the weekly limits in one day. Anthropic needs to increase the limits or offer an Opus-heavy plan.

I've been using Cursor with Sonnet 3.5 on coding for months but for the last month Cursor's overall performance highly degraded. Then 2 weeks ago I came across aistudio.google.com with Gemini Pro 2.5 05-06 experimental model which is currently entirely free on the webui, and it's performance greatly impressed me so I solely use it since then.

But now I wonder if $100 or $200 Max tiers of Claude would serve me better or not for same coding tasks.

Can anybody compare?

Has anyone really experimented with these two with regards to creative writing? And if so, which one do you think is better? Sonnet 3.5 has a lot of impressive capabilities for sure but I wonder if its writing quality is really on par with Opus 3. Thoughts?

They consistently state: We recommend switching to Sonnet 4.5, which now offers: Better coding performance than Opus 4.1

I'd like to see a vote or get a sense of what people are seeing in real situations.

I feel like still get far better results from Opus.

Thoughts?