The difference in productivity between babysitting Sonnet and trying to get the result into a good shape compared to using Opus 4.8 seems large to me
user43928 on Hacker News
17M tokens total in the last 30 days
In the thread “Why current LLM costs are not sustainable”, replying to this comment
Helped: Using Opus 4.8 instead of Sonnet for better results.
Got in the way: Claude Desktop app token counter is buggy and inaccurate.
… It is not my experience that you need to do 'hardcore stuff' to require the use of a large model. The difference in productivity between babysitting Sonnet and trying to get the result into a good shape compared to using Opus 4.8 seems large to me. At home, unfortunately I only have the stats from the official apps rather than granular ones, and it looks like the Claude Desktop app is buggy: it was showing 17M tokens total in the last 30 days, but even just clicking on a conversation in my side bar increased the counter to 19M. …