50% cheaper Claude inference with just one line of... code change! - Remove → model="claude-opus-4-8" - Add → model="ship-like/claude-opus-4-8" I verified the cost saving in my own terminal by invoking the same Anthropic model with the same prompt. The underlying engineering by Ship is actually interesting, and the patterns can be used in any production LLM stack. Essentially, a trained model is a frozen artifact. Every request performs the same forward-pass, whether it extracts a date or refactors a module, because the compute decision was made at training time, before the request existed. Ship makes that decision at inference time instead. After seeing a request, it searches over executions, involving single models, cascades, ensembles, or harnesses with tools, and serves the cheapest one that will match the reference model's quality. This is not a basic router, because picking a cheaper model per query doesn't ensure the cheaper model preserves the original's behavior, like output shape, tool-call patterns, and refusals. Ship measures this equivalence directly. Outputs stay distributionally indistinguishable from the reference model, not token-identical, since two calls to the same model already differ, but they are indistinguishable in capability and behavior. Of course, some requests execute cheaply and some cost Ship more than the customer pays, but the price per request is still a flat 50% off either way, so the execution-cost variance moves off the application's bill entirely. The video below depicts the cost savings and output in my real invocation, and I partnered with the team to put this together.show more

PAYING PER MODEL IS THE DUMBEST THING IN TECH... RIGHT NOW i was paying 3x what i needed to for AI inference the grid lets you buy a quality spec instead of a specific model.. it routes every request in real time to the cheapest option that qualifies swap one url and your code keeps working exactly the same openai-compatible, one line to switch, 200M free tokens to startshow more

Don't train the model, evolve the harness. I read... a brilliant blog post from Hugging Face where they took a frozen open model scoring 0% on a hard legal agent benchmark, left its weights alone, and let an automated loop rewrite only the code around it. That code layer is the harness, the runtime wrapper that feeds the model context, runs its tool calls, and decides when a run ends. By the time the loop finished, the system had essentially matched Sonnet 4.6 on the benchmark's headline metric, at roughly 7x lower cost per task. Zero weights changed. The gain existed because of where the model was failing. The judge only grades files saved in the right place under the exact requested filename, and the model kept doing the legal analysis correctly, then saving it under the wrong name, dropping it in a scratch folder, or never writing it at all. So the 0% was never measuring legal reasoning. It was measuring the harness. Hand-tuning that layer is slow and model-specific, so they automated it. A Claude proposer adds exactly one mechanism per iteration, and an outer loop keeps it only if it clearly beats the current best, so accepted mechanisms compound. What the loop discovered says a lot about where agents actually fail. → The biggest single gain was file handling, not intelligence. An automatic step that lands the deliverable exactly where the judge expects it beat every prompt change, with zero extra model tokens. → Code fixes transferred across models, prompt playbooks did not. The same harness lifted a smaller model from the same family by 14 points, but the tuned prompts hurt a different model family on tasks it could already finish. → The harness mattered more than anything else. Same model, same judge, same tasks, and five different harnesses scored anywhere between 3.5% and 80.1%. The gains do eventually flatten, and the remaining misses look like real capability gaps. At some point the wrapper runs out of tricks and the model has to carry the work. But the lesson holds. A benchmark score measures the model and its harness together, and until the harness is fixed, it's impossible to know which one failed. I highly recommend reading this: I also wrote a deep dive on agent harness engineering a while back, covering the orchestration loop, tools, memory, context management, and everything that turns a stateless LLM into a capable agent. The article is quoted below.show more

New open-source agent harness just landed! I got early... access to TrueForge by TrueFoundry and have been running it locally for the past few days. The harness layer deserves as much attention as the model, and open source matters here because you can inspect the loop, run it on your own infrastructure, and swap to the latest or cheaper models. TrueForge handles the runtime work that makes an agent reliable. It drives the tool-calling loop, manages context, coordinates subagents, and executes code in a sandbox, with any model you choose. Every tool call re-sends the growing context to the model, so in practice the harness controls most of what an agent costs to run. A few things stood out from my testing and their published benchmarks. Vendor-Neutral by design. It runs OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models alongside open-weight models like Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek. Model routing is a setting, and you can send each task to the model that fits it. On a 14-task enterprise agent benchmark, it matched the accuracy of Claude Managed Agents running the same Opus 4.8 model at roughly 30% lower cost per run (3.8M tokens vs 10M for the same answers). Routing the same tasks to GLM-5.2 held accuracy and brought cost down by about 75%, around $3 per run instead of $12. Fully self-hosted and Open Source (MIT License). I had it running locally with one command, with sandboxed code execution working out of the box. It's time to own your agent harness. Thanks to TrueFoundry for partnering on this post.show more

a moonshot engineer leaked the benchmark anthropic, openai and... xai all buried the same week: kimi k3 beat opus 5, gpt-5.6 and grok 4.6 at $0.94 a task. stop paying anthropic $200 a month for opus 5 and openai $200 for gpt-5.6 when kimi does the same work for $8 the leak showed kimi k3 winning 9 of 12 categories against opus 5, gpt-5.6 and grok 4.6. within 48 hours all three labs quietly pushed pricing pages and one very specific comparison chart off their sites. nobody announced anything. they just deleted, which tells you everything the four numbers they scrubbed: cost per task · $0.94 vs $1.80 -> opus 5 charges $1.80 to finish one task. gpt-5.6 $1.04. grok 4.6 $0.61. kimi k3 $0.94 and it landed 487 of 500 clean -> anthropic is billing you double for a model that lost the benchmark it paid to promote the weights · free, sitting on huggingface right now -> the entire model is a public download. pull it, keep it, run it forever, nobody can switch it off -> a model you can hold cannot be rented at $200 a month. that single fact is what three labs deleted a chart over the switch · one line of bash -> moonshot ships an anthropic-compatible endpoint. one env variable and claude code points at kimi -> same cli, same keybindings, same /model. you change a url, opus 5 never knows it lost the seat the bill · $400 down to $8 -> opus 5 max plus gpt-5.6 pro is $400 a month. kimi runs the same daily work for $8 metered -> that is a 98% cut for output that beat both of them 9 categories to 3 here is the part they will fight me on: the frontier tax died the week this leaked and all three labs know it. once the weights are public the price has a ceiling, because anyone can serve the same model. anthropic, openai and xai are charging 2025 prices on a lead that ended in a benchmark they deleted instead of answered drop your $400/mo ai stack to $8. the run above is kimi k3 finishing the task opus 5 bills $1.80 for. the full breakdown is in the article belowshow more

Routing for long-horizon coding agents is a big deal.... Not Diamond just announced a model router that works natively with Claude Code. This is huge. It picks the model and reasoning effort before each turn in a session, runs through a privacy-preserving local proxy, and your requests still execute through your own gateway. In their benchmarks, it approximates Opus 4.8 Xhigh quality at 39 to 61 percent lower cost.show more

We just launched Claude Sonnet 4.5 and “Imagine with... Claude”, a 5-day preview that creates dynamic experiences for you in real-time (and the first product I’ve worked on at Anthropic!). It pioneers the concept of “model-as-backend”, using a model to not only generate interfaces on the fly but also power all the functionality behind it – all made possible by our newest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5. Here’s a "choose your own adventure" version of my founder journey, as retold by Imagine with Claude:show more

$35 OF FREE CLAUDE OPUS 5 CREDITS FOR A... WEEK, NO CARD ANYWHERE • the credit > Sign up with Google and the trial activates on its own, nothing to claim manually: > Opus 5 sits alongside Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku on the same key. > The window runs a week from activation. • wiring it up > base url: > model id: claude-opus-5 > In OpenCode Desktop hit Ctrl+, and add a custom provider with the id aerolink. > The same key drops into Codex, Cursor and Claude Code with nothing else changed. One key, not locked to one client -> every tool that takes a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint reads it the same way. It routes through a third-party proxy rather than an official Anthropic channel, so keep client work off it ↓show more

whoever leaked this has bigger balls than sense Google... Research and MIT ran the same agent jobs 260 different ways for Nature last month: they held the prompts, the tools and the compute budget identical and moved nothing but the wiring between the agents, and the same work swung from 70% worse than a single agent to 80.8% better, averaging out at 0.0% i ran my own single agent against the task list first and it cleared 6 of 10 alone, already past the line where a crew starts subtracting this is Graph Engineering, the layer that decides whether a crew is worth 80% more or 70% less, and it installs into the agent you already pay for: - score your solo agent on the real task first: above roughly 45% success that study predicts zero to negative returns from any crew you put around it - under that line, put one supervisor over the fan out: crews with no correction step amplified their own errors to 17.2x the single agent rate, supervised aggregation held it to 4.4x - give every worker one output and let none of them read a peer's draft, so a wrong step reaches the supervisor instead of four other agents - run the comparison again after every model upgrade, because a better model raises your baseline and a higher baseline is what makes a crew stop paying - keep the single agent alive as the control, the only number that says the wiring is earning its calls turns out the shape does not travel: the biggest win came off a finance task under one supervisor and the worst collapse off a planning task with independent agents my position, and it is the arguable one: a crew is a bet on your own diagram, and the model you pick moves that bet less than one arrow does bookmark this, the three moves that draw those arrows before you pay for one extra call are in the post below ↓show more

HERMES AGENT NOW RUNS CLAUDE OPUS 5. NEAR FABLE... 5 INTELLIGENCE. HALF THE PRICE. SELF-VERIFIES ITS OWN WORK. AVAILABLE TODAY VIA NOUS PORTAL (20% OFF ALL MODELS). Anthropic shipped Opus 5 on July 24, 2026. same $5/$25 per million tokens as Opus 4.8. but the benchmarks tell a different story. WHAT CHANGED FROM OPUS 4.8: FrontierBench v0.1: Opus 5: 43.3%. Opus 4.8: 18.7%. 2.3x jump on the same test. ARC-AGI-3: Opus 5: 30.2%. 3x better than the next closest model. beat Fable 5 on 8 out of 13 benchmarks. at half the cost ($5/$25 vs $10/$50). same price as Opus 4.8. twice the intelligence. no reason to stay on 4.8. THE SPECS: model ID: claude-opus-5 context: 1M tokens (default and maximum) max output: 128K tokens thinking: on by default effort toggle: low / medium / high per request fast mode: $10/$50, 2.5x faster knowledge cutoff: May 2026 minimum cacheable prompt: 512 tokens (was 1,024) SELF-VERIFICATION (the biggest change): Opus 5 checks its own work automatically. Anthropic says: delete your verification prompts. "include a final verification step" now causes OVER-verification because the model already does it. for Hermes /goal tasks this is a direct upgrade. the judge checks evidence. the model also checks evidence. double layer of verification without extra tokens. EFFORT TOGGLE: low: fast, cheap, routine work. medium: balanced, daily tasks. high: full reasoning, complex problems. set per request. not a global switch. matches Hermes /reasoning command: /reasoning low (routine) /reasoning high (complex) Opus 5 effort toggle + Hermes reasoning control = precise cost management per turn. WHERE OPUS 5 FITS IN HERMES: DAILY DRIVER (replaces Opus 4.8): same price. 2.3x better benchmarks. set as your main model: Desktop app / Dashboard: Models → claude-opus-5 CHIEF OF STAFF: synthesis across multiple agents. reads Kanban, prioritizes, routes tasks. self-verification catches routing errors before they cascade. COMPLEX CODING: SOTA on agentic coding benchmarks. FrontierBench 43.3% = best public model for coding. set as coder profile model. /GOAL TASKS: self-verification + completion contracts = the model proves its work AND double-checks the proof. long-horizon goals finish correctly more often. MoA AGGREGATOR: strongest synthesis model at $5/$25. pair with GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 as references. Opus 5 aggregates. best quality at mid-range price. presets: max-quality: reference_models: - provider: openai-codex model: gpt-5.6-sol - provider: xai model: grok-4.5 aggregator: provider: anthropic model: claude-opus-5 COMPUTER USE: near-Fable 5 quality for browser automation. at half the token cost per session. computer_use tasks burn lots of vision tokens. Opus 5 halves that bill vs Fable 5. WHAT TO KEEP OPUS 5 AWAY FROM: cron monitoring: too expensive. use DeepSeek or no_agent mode. sub-agent grunt work: use GPT-5.6 Luna ($1/$6) or DeepSeek. auxiliary tasks: use Gemini Flash. routine web extraction: use a cheap model. Opus 5 is for the turns where quality compounds. planning, synthesis, verification, complex reasoning. budget models handle everything else. NOUS PORTAL: 20% OFF ALL MODELS Nous Portal currently runs a 20% discount on all models including Opus 5. $5/$25 official → $4/$20 through Nous Portal. the cheapest way to run Opus 5 right now. hermes setup --portal select claude-opus-5 as your model. discount applies automatically. Opus 5 replaces Opus 4.8 everywhere. same price. better at everything. no tradeoff. straight upgrade. hermes update /model claude-opus-5show more

MOST PEOPLE WHO BUILD WEBSITES USE CLAUDE CODE THE... WRONG WAY A few people train it properly and get the bottom one. The difference is not the model. It is the skills you feed it. Regular Claude without web-design systems produces clean but average product pages. The same Claude, loaded with the right skills, starts delivering sites that look like they cost $5,000. Those skills are free right now. They live on GitHub. The exact names sit in the article below. One set of prompts. One trained workflow. Suddenly every luxury brand page you build stops looking like a template and starts looking like money.show more

A good technical LLM interview question: Your LLM chatbot... takes 12s before it generates the first token, and the users are complaining. So you move the model onto a GPU with 3x the computing power. The time to first token barely improves. Why did this happen? (answer below) Latency in an LLM app is a placement problem disguised as a model problem. If you profile the 12 seconds, the model's prefill itself may only account for around 1.5 seconds of it. So halving the prefill step saves just 750ms out of 12000, which is under 7%. The rest is spread across stages that never touch the GPU. The request first travels to whatever region the app runs in, and a cross-continent round trip could cost over a second before any code executes. Then the request handler starts. On a container-based serverless platform under load, this adds several seconds of cold start, paid before auth, rate limiting, or prompt assembly even begins. Retrieval adds its own hop, and the response streams back across the same distance. Optimizing a stage that was already fast cannot alter the latency that's majorly affected by other stages. Those other stages are slow for a structural reason. An LLM app runs two workloads that want opposite machines. - The request path is short, spiky, and needs to sit close to users - Inference is long-running, GPU-bound, and billed hourly, whether requests arrive or not. So the actual decision is not which model to run, but where each of these two workloads runs. There are three options, each with its own tradeoffs: > A dedicated GPU box removes inference cold starts, but it bills around the clock and lives in one location, so distant users wait out the round trip on every request > Container-based serverless scales to zero, but the request path pays a cold start, and most of these platforms have no GPU behind them. > Edge runtimes start in under a millisecond, because a WebAssembly module carries no OS or container image to boot. They handle the request path well and cannot hold a model. So the answer is not to pick one, but to split the app across two of them. The request path runs close to users, and inference runs on a dedicated GPU it calls into. That also explains the failed upgrade. More compute made a stage that was already fast faster, and left the 10.5 seconds around it untouched. To actually learn how it's done in practice, Akamai's GitHub has a reference implementation for each half. - vllm-on-lke serves Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint on one RTX 4000 Ada GPU in Linode Kubernetes Engine, with Terraform creating the cluster, both firewalls, and the GPU operator in one apply. - akamai-functions-llm-chatbot covers the front, where a WebAssembly API checks a KV cache and only calls the GPU-backed instance on a miss. Both are available on Akamai’s new Developer Hub, alongside their tutorials and code samples. It also links to Edge Case, their Discord, where four developer advocates architect and deploy a production app live every other Wednesday. If you create a new Akamai Cloud account, you can also get $300 in credits for joining. Join here: That said, this post treats generation as a single 1.5s block, but that block has its own structure, and knowing it well tells you whether a model is slow to start or slow to stream. I wrote a first-principles walkthrough of it, covering the prefill and decode split, KV caching, and where the time actually goes inside each one. Read it below. Thanks to Akamai Cloud for partnering today!show more

let me save you 3 hours of head scratching.... if you're running local models like Qwen3.5-35B-A3B through Claude Code via llama.cpp's Anthropic endpoint, the chain will break every 3 to 5 minutes. tool call fails. flow stops. you reprompt. it recovers. 2 minutes later it stops again. the model is fine. the harness chokes on local inference latency. switch to OpenCode. same localhost endpoint. same model. same GPU. the chain doesn't break. the tradeoff: OpenCode sometimes loops. the model forgets what it already read and repeats the same tool call. but a loop you can interrupt. a broken chain kills your momentum and you start over. watch both side by side. proprietary agent vs open source agent. same 3B model. different failure modes. pick your poison.show more

Big win for open-source LLMs! DeepSeek V4 Pro holds... the top open-weights score on SWE-bench Verified, in the GPT-5.5 range. GLM 5.2 leads the open-weight intelligence index and sits near the closed frontier on long-horizon coding. But this leaderboard number is a weak proxy for real performance. It comes from one task set, run through one harness, served at one precision. The same weights can even score differently across providers, since many hosts quantize activations to fp8 and drift the model off its reference weights. Real performance is determined based on whether a model can read a repo, make coordinated edits across files, run the tests, and recover when one breaks. By that measure, the top open models hold up, but only inside the right harness. The teams that actually put DeepSeek V4 into production pipelines as a frontier substitute got there through the harness they built around the model, not by picking a stronger model. If you want to see this in practice, Cline (64k+ stars) has actually built that harness around open models, tuned so they run at production quality. And it's tuned so that these LLMs can run at production quality, with plan and act modes, checkpoints, and terminal feedback. ClinePass is the new access layer on top of it. It runs a curated set of those models inside Cline, narrowed to the ones tested for coding-agent use, with 2 to 5x the standard rate limits and no separate provider accounts, keys, or billing to track. The video below shows the setup, and I worked with the team to put this together. It runs alongside custom keys and local models as well, not in place of them.show more

i built an open world minigame that's controlled with... hand movements only here's a step-by-step tutorial: > started with my mediapipe + threejs template (see QT) > added a 3D model made by quaternius > sent a few prompts to gemini 3... --- prompt #1: repurpose the attached script, but now I want to import a gltf model (assets/model.gltf) and use that in the scene instead of the cube when the user moves their hand, a waypoint indicator should move around the scene, and the 3D model should smoothly move there when the user makes a fist, the model should jump the 3D model contains bundled animations in it. use the "idle", "run", and "jump" animations --- prompt #2: make this a procedural open world adventure. generate very simple procedural voxel terrain when the model gets near the edges of the screen, the camera should move, allowing the model to keep going in that direction --- prompt #3: add some floating glowing gems around the map that the user can collect --- i made some manual tweaks for styling and game feel, but that's the gist of it thanks for reading if you got all the way here full code is available at my link in bioshow more

Most people are still asking: Opus or Sonnet? That... may already be the wrong question. Claude is starting to look less like an AI model and more like an AI operating layer. The models are only one part of it. Around them, Anthropic is building the pieces required to move AI from a chat window into real software: → Reasoning models → MCP and tool connectivity → Agent frameworks and SDKs → APIs and managed agents → Memory and context systems → Security and permissions → Evaluation pipelines → Governance and observability → Production deployment infrastructure And that changes what it means to be good at AI engineering. Prompting is becoming table stakes. The harder skill is understanding how an agent gets context, remembers what matters, accesses tools safely, evaluates its own output, survives failures, and operates reliably inside a production system. That is a very different skillset from simply knowing which model tops a benchmark. In 2026, the advantage may not belong to the person who knows the best model. It may belong to the person who understands how the entire AI stack fits together. Claude’s evolution is a good preview of where AI engineering itself is heading.show more

Added context to my tiny diffusion model to enable... sequential generation of longer outputs! Currently the context is a quarter of the sequence length (seq_len=256, context_len=64). I have a theory that the less semantic-value-per-token, the worse the “curse of parallel decoding” is. With parallel decoding, we independently predict multiple tokens in one step. With the sentence “My poker hand was a ___ ___”, two valid predictions are “two pair” and “straight flush”. Because each token prediction is independent though, we can end up with a nonsensical output like “two flush”. This seems to be exacerbated with low semantic-value-per-token, as now you need more tokens to express the same concept. Instead of needing to independently predict two tokens, we might need to predict 10 instead (which is of course much harder). The model currently has noticeably worse output compared to nanogpt (similar size) and I believe this is a main reason. I’ll try adding confidence-aware parallel decoding (from NVIDIA’s Fast-dLLM paper) and other tricks and see how much they improve generation quality.show more

World Models are the path for some AI Models... in the future. But how can we efficiently train these models to not only see the world the way humans do but to see the world in a new and unique way. By visualizing, what is normally sequenced audio patterns, we can derive much more insights. Here we see Paganini in a visual form that can than be described and transcribed into a World Model. We can observe connections in a manner that may not have been clear prior to the digitalization of music and sound in this way. The company with the most valuable potential in building a World Model is Tesla. Not that this type of visualization is being used, but that the mechanisms are in place, and the technology is in place for the company to thrive in this new form of AI.show more

After a few more hours, I think I've figured... out Opus 5. Opus 5 is trained to be more agentic than anything I've used. All Claude 5 models are like that. So what changes? The way to interact with Opus 5 or contextualize it won't work the same way as with other models. It loves exploring, so it doesn't need much guidance for it. Unique preferences, artifacts, and references compliment it well and enable cleaner and more effective exploration and execution. Now that it can explore more effectively on its own and understand intent better, the best thing to do is to get out of its way (e.g., it doesn't need examples of your preferences; a clear high-level description of it works best). It's truly agentic in that sense. A good first step to provide better context for Opus 5 is to distinguish between what's situational and what needs persistence. Regardless, persistent system prompts and CLAUDE.MD needs to stay lightweight. Remove memories and tool descriptions from these. CLAUDE.MD is also a great place to tap into progressive disclosure by linking command/skills to it. On the situational side, agent skills and auto-memory can leverage progressive disclosure and the improved ability of the model to use its external context/knowledge. Conflicting and unnecessary instructions, which are common at this layer (mainly to ensure reliability), are going to throw off this model easily. That's the biggest change I had to make. Simple, clean, and clear prompts and skills work best. I had to clean a lot of my skills and system prompts. The way I prompt remains the same (usually clear and well-scoped). MCP tool descriptions are also more descriptive and have been deduped from the system prompt. Anthropic released a guide on the new rules for context engineering, which was helpful here. I started to test the recommendations and created a little artifact with the things that worked along the way. This might feel like a lot of work. Believe me, it has been frustrating. But I think we can expect future frontier models to become more agentic and smarter at figuring out the right context/gaps. The best thing to do is to prepare for that now. Boris Cherny mentioned that Opus 5 is their least prompt-injectable model yet. I am not sure if that was something they intentionally trained for or if it emerged based on how it was trained, which is to be extremely agentic in nature and more direct in execution.show more

I MADE MY AI AGENT 10X FASTER WITHOUT CHANGING... THE MODEL not a smarter model, not a bigger context window, not another clever prompt the same kind of AI that designs vaccines for viruses we have not even met yet was spending two minutes opening the wrong files just to hand me a brief from three months ago the problem was never capability, it was the scaffolding that piled up around my agent by accident, folder by folder an agent does not think in your categories, it searches from scratch every single time, and your tidy human folders are a maze to it the fix was almost stupidly small, one index file at the root of each big folder and a few numbers in front of the folder names slowest task dropped from 2 minutes to 26 seconds, fastest ones hit 10, zero model changes capability is cheap when the scaffolding around it is broken the article breaks down the whole system in 15 minutes ↓show more