How Anthropic ships Claude with Claude: Separating the Brain from the Hands
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, the Claude Platform, and the engineering behind AI agents.
Search headlines, summaries and articles to connect the dots.
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, the Claude Platform, and the engineering behind AI agents.
The biggest highlight is that the price has been cut in half.
arXiv:2610.31946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three students answered the same exam prompt by hand: "What is happiness? Are you happy?" Their ages, recorded at collection, are 17, 28, and 45. The 17-year-old's answer is hedged and formally phrased. Asked to match each answer to an age and gender label, most frontier language models confidently assign it to an adult. This paper reports a structured case study of that failure across six models: Claude Fable 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.5, GPT-4o (2024), and DeepSeek V4. We ran 1,081 API sessions and scored 3,225 responses across six experimental conditions that manipulate framing, disclosure format, and audience-awareness instruction. Three of six models perform at or near chance (1/3) on the matching task while reporting 73-88%
Tool: Quick Study Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High: Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a watercolor illustration with P5.js. Quick Study uses Sobel edge detection, with no external libraries beyond Google Fonts. Tags: tools
Redesigning source control at Anthropic Interesting piece from Anthropic describing why and how they built their own custom alternative to Git, based on the dramatic increase in rate of changes to their code after the past six months. In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day. They included a chart showing those changes. I had Claude modify their chart (code here) to add markers for the public releases of each of their models in 2026: This shows public release dates, not the date when models became available for Anthropic's internal use. My guess is that the introduction of Fable/Mythos class models is a key factor in the increased coding velocity. "Antique" is their new code review system. The source control sy
Release: llm-gemini 0.35 I added support to llm-gemini for the new Gemini 4 Argon model, made available today via the Gemini API and for customers of their $100/month subscription plan. Here are the low, medium and high pelicans. As expected, they are all excellent: Gemini has a track record of producing great SVGs, and are the only lab where I know their staff have invested in SVG specifically (and who have boasted about their pelicans before.) Here's the "high" illustration, which cost me 17.166 cents: The pricing is interesting. At launch, Argon is $2/million input and $10/million output - the same price as GPT-6 Sol, half the price of Claude Opus 5.5 and 1/5th the price of Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra. But on December 1st Argon is set to double in price - so it will be the same pri
Release: llm-meta-ai 0.2 Meta AI release Muse Wonder (and Muse Wonder Full), their new "most capable models". These look like they may be Meta's first Fable class models - Artificial Analysis scores Muse Wonder (Max) as equivalent to GPT-6.1 Sol. I updated my llm-meta-ai plugin for the new model. Here are pelicans for Muse Wonder for the six reasoning levels: minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, max. This is the max one: For comparison, here are pelicans for Muse 1.3 (released September 2nd) and Muse 1.2 (released August 5th). Meta AI are putting out a new model a month, and the improvements between each model (at least in terms of drawing pelicans) are material. Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, meta, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release