🚀 New Video: I Spent 4 Days With Claude Opus 4.8 — Here's What Anthropic Isn't Telling You

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Jun 7 • Youtube

Before this dropped, I had basically given up on Claude. 4.7 was so frustrating I'd moved most of my coding to GPT-5.5. Opus 4.8 pulled me right back in. I spent the last few days doing nothing but testing it side-by-side with 4.7 on real builds — here's the honest read.

The frame nobody is connecting:

4.7 dropped April 16. 4.8 dropped 42 days later — fastest Anthropic has ever turned a model around
The reason: they had a compute crisis. Anthropic grew 80x this year (planned for 10x). CEO confirmed it on record
The fix: a $1.25B/month deal with xAI for 220k+ GPUs. The same week the deal landed, Anthropic doubled limits in Claude Code
And the kicker — the price didn't move. 4.8 still $5/$25 per M tokens. Fast mode 3x cheaper

What's actually different from 4.7:

The second-guessing loops are gone. 4.7 would talk itself out of the right answer and back into it while you watched tokens drain. 4.8 commits
Long-running tasks finally work. 4.7 drifted, redid old decisions, asked "should I keep going?" every few minutes. 4.8 holds the thread. You can leave it alone on a big job
/goal, dynamic workflows, ultracode — Anthropic shipped the long-run tooling alongside it. The model + the tools finally pull in the same direction

Two real tests in the video (built same prompt on both):

Solar system simulator — 4.7 built a working orbit demo. 4.8 added click-a-planet stats, fly-through, and land-on-surface modes. Same prompt
2001 + 2026 encyclopedia — 4.7 built two good versions. 4.8 tied them together with a single idea: "a clickable link was born blue in 1991 and we kept the blue"

Where GPT-5.5 still wins: Terminal-Bench (78 vs 74). Anyone telling you 4.8 sweeps the board is lying. But on Agentic coding it's 69 vs 58 — and it's the strongest model Anthropic has ever shipped on computer use.

My verdict: if you gave up on Claude over the last 6 weeks, this is the one to come back for. It's what 4.7 should have been the whole time. Feels like 4.6 with the rough edges smoothed off.

📎 Full Opus 4.8 review guide PDF pinned below — the compute backstory, both side-by-side test breakdowns, the long-running task analysis, and the honest benchmark read.

Comment: are you still on Claude, or fully GPT-pilled? 👇

[Watch the video here ▶️]

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🚀 New Video: I Spent 4 Days With Claude Opus 4.8 — Here's What Anthropic Isn't Telling You