Especially with advent of agents, I have dropped all illusions of ever getting paid for this outside of like freelance work. Will keep working through cs:app3e for the love of the game.

I was a 4.6 acolyte from April til the fable drop, lost that quick, cancelled and took a break, came back a month later, tried opus 5 and liked it, so unpinned 4.6.

Results were great at first, and they're still not terrible, but I have noticed a regression in accuracy, so to speak, where I am pointing out issues that are quite obvious in review.

I pretty much use sonnet 5 low/medium when I have a plan to solve a simple problem and depending on scope, opus low/medium for more complex/bigger scope implementation, and only go high when it's very complex or I'm spitballing architecture/solutions and iterating plan. Never go xhigh or max.

The verbosity is insane though, opus 5 documents everything and just regurgitates whatever lead it to the design choice in there, which makes it more opaque because it's talking about something that was discussed once in a session that no one else can see (except their backend ofc)

I don't even try to steer it away from that with harness, because it doesn't work and just ends up agonizing over whether it should write some comment. Three paragraphs waffling on that on verbose output

I did however have it write a script that basically is git add -A -p for comments though, haha.

I'm $20/month, have all my telemetry toggles off, don't really over engineer prompt/context, just some basic skills for repeated patterns.

Feeling the finality

Of his greatest achievement

He couldn't believe it

But it's true, now he's feelin' blue

So between me and you:

Think twice before you do

Tends to latch onto whatever was true at the time of its training run unless you point it to the llm.txt.

Anthropic had something about API-only in the description a couple months back, but they've been waking all those back for months since the fable access rollback fallout

I have some wrappers but the only one I really use is a variant of that pinned to haiku for quick questions.

I'm sure many more examples in the "official marketplaces" for mcp/skills/what have you

Only ones I use today are for very specific quirks (eg wiredtiger/mongodb 8+ incompatible with ext4/Linux 6.19+ specifically causing segfaults. Have a 20 line mongo skill that says as much. Pinned docker container to mongo 7, can prob delete it now)

I spent a few days reading up on the docs for these things, hook lifecycles, tried writing a few, but they never work as documented, or the documentation changes so frequently that whatever you built is deprecated by the time you get it humming.

Now if I have some non-trivial unit of work, I basically iterate on spec in plan mode then put it on auto and let it rip. Way better results with Fable. jury out on Opus 5, but no regression like 4.7/8

Usually it's just echo "do this lil thing then pr closing issue 123" --model sonnet --effort low. Works well enough, sonnet 5 low is a workhorse and quite resourceful in a good way when things go sideways; doesn't cheat its way out IME