I left Claude for months. Opus 5.5 is why I'm back
- ID
- 27412
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 23 Sep 2026, 3:06 AM
- Fetched
- 23 Sep 2026, 4:03 AM
- Provider
- Lenny's Newsletter
- Category
- product-startup
- Original URL
- https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/i-left-claude-for-months-opus-55
- Source URL
- https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/feed
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 23 Sep 2026, 4:03 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_agent_usersai_ml_learners
What happened
Claire Vo abandoned Claude for months due to its rambling, hedging, and preachy disclaimers, moving her daily work to OpenAI's Codex. After a week of testing Claude Opus 5.5 — which Anthropic claims is 40% cheaper than Opus 5, faster, and built on a 'fundamentally different alignment approach' — she ran four long-running agentic tasks, a ChatPRD homepage redesign, an SVG benchmark, and frontend prototyping, concluding Opus 5.5 is now her go-to for frontend work, though Codex still wins in some areas and two annoyances remain.
Why it matters
If you've been avoiding Claude because of verbose, preachy outputs, Opus 5.5's alignment changes and 40% price drop may justify re-evaluating it for agentic and frontend workflows — but Vo's split-stack verdict (Claude for frontend/prototyping, Codex for other tasks) suggests you should test both rather than committing to one model.
Discussion angle
Compare your own model stack split: where does Claude Opus 5.5 actually beat or lose to Codex in your real agentic and frontend work, and does the 40% cost reduction change the economics enough to switch back?