Claude Opus 4.8 is here. Is it as good as they say?

I got a few hours of early-access testing with Anthropic’s newly released model Opus 4.8. I walk through real coding, design, and strategy tasks across Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and give you my unfiltered view on what impressed me and what didn’t.—What you’ll learn:Where Opus 4.8 excels: greenfield prototypes, one-shot features, and fast executionWhere it struggles: the last 10%, edge cases in existing codebases, and hallucinationsHow Opus 4.8 compares to Opus 4.7 on business strategy workWhy I’m still reaching for Opus 4.7 on data-heavy strategy and roadmap workThe new features shipping alongside the model: dynamic workflows with parallel subagents and effort control in Claude.ai and CoworkThe prompting and harness strategy I’d use to get the most out of it—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Opus 4.8 (00:44) Benchmark performance and pricing(01:53) First coding test: Building a prototyping tool(03:00) Where it failed: The last 10% problem(03:27) The hallucination problem(04:23) Testing Opus 4.8 on existing codebases(05:24) The ambition test: Building games for a 9-year-old(07:03) Business strategy test: 4.7 vs 4.8(08:23) The roadmap test(09:17) Final verdict—References:• System Card: Claude Opus 4.8: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/c886650a2e96fc0925c805a1a7ca77314ccbf4a6.pdf• Introducing Claude Opus 4.8 on X: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2060042702150930686?s=20—Where to find Claire Vo:ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/Website: https://clairevo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/X: https://x.com/clairevo—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].