Claude Opus 4.8 is here. Is it as good as they say? - How I AI | Lyssna här

I got a few hours of early-access testing with Anthropic’s newly released model Opus 4.8. I walk through real coding, design, and strategy tasks across Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and give you my unfiltered view on what impressed me and what didn’t.

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What you’ll learn:

Where Opus 4.8 excels: greenfield prototypes, one-shot features, and fast execution
Where it struggles: the last 10%, edge cases in existing codebases, and hallucinations
How Opus 4.8 compares to Opus 4.7 on business strategy work
Why I’m still reaching for Opus 4.7 on data-heavy strategy and roadmap work
The new features shipping alongside the model: dynamic workflows with parallel subagents and effort control in Claude.ai and Cowork
The prompting and harness strategy I’d use to get the most out of it

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Opus 4.8

(00:44) Benchmark performance and pricing

(01:53) First coding test: Building a prototyping tool

(03:00) Where it failed: The last 10% problem

(03:27) The hallucination problem

(04:23) Testing Opus 4.8 on existing codebases

(05:24) The ambition test: Building games for a 9-year-old

(07:03) Business strategy test: 4.7 vs 4.8

(08:23) The roadmap test

(09:17) Final verdict