I’ve been off Claude for months. Not because it got dumb, but because it got annoying. The rambling, the hedging, the preachy little disclaimers on tasks that didn’t need them. I moved most of my daily work to Codex and I didn’t miss it. Then Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5: 40% cheaper than Opus 5, faster, and with what they’re calling a fundamentally different alignment approach. I ran it for a week across real work, including four long-running agentic tasks, a full ChatPRD homepage redesign, an SVG benchmark, and one very firm refusal, and I’m ready to give you the honest verdict. There’s a lot to like. There are still two things that drive me a little crazy. And there’s one capability I genuinely wasn’t expecting.
What you’ll learn:
- Why I walked away from Claude entirely, and what it took for me to come back
- The real cost math on Opus 5.5 and why pricing matters more for agentic work than single prompts
- What happened when I ran four long-running agentic tasks, including one that tried to manipulate Claude mid-run
- Why Opus 5.5 is now my go-to for frontend prototyping, and where it still lets me down
- The one capability I genuinely didn’t see coming, and no other model in my stack can match it
- The moment Opus 5.5 told me flat-out no, and what that says about where Anthropic’s safety posture actually lands in practice
- Where Codex still wins, and how I’m splitting my model stack after a full week of testing
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In this episode:
(00:00) Why I stopped using Claude
(01:02) What Anthropic says Opus 5.5 is
(01:54) Cost, speed, and benchmark overview
(03:20) Safety, alignment, and the cybersecurity limits
(05:02) How I AI bench
(05:39) Voice test: is it actually not annoying?
(07:54) Long-running agentic task results
(10:50) Frontend prototyping
(17:23) Writing voice and email
(19:41) SVG illustrations
(20:46) Video editing
(21:42) My verdict: what it’s good at, what it still isn’t
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Tools referenced:
• Claude Opus 5.5: anthropic.com
• ElevenLabs MCP connector: elevenlabs.io
• Codex (OpenAI): openai.com
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: chatprd.ai
Website: clairevo.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com
X: x.com
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