Opus 4.7 Reels Us Back In

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Vibe shift

Did Opus 4.7 get better?

If you’ve been following Dan Shipper’s posts lately, you know that a large portion of the Every team has been Codex-pilled. When GPT-5.5 arrived, Codex got so much faster and steadier at coding and knowledge work that many of us made the switch from Claude Code.

Recently, however, we’ve observed that Opus 4.7 seems sharper than our initial tests last month. It proactively suggested that Every engineer Paridhi Agarwal use multiple terminals to parallelize her work. “I’ve never seen it think about my setup like that!” she says.

When head of growth and known Codex convert Austin Tedesco fired up Opus 4.7 over the weekend for a creative writing project, he was surprised by how good the results were. Compared to Codex, which Austin says operates like an “AP fact checker,” Opus 4.7 was closer to a senior magazine editor. Dan agrees: “Codex feels fast but thin in terms of thinking.”

On Tuesday, Anthropic released fast mode for Opus 4.7, which makes the model 2.5 times faster at a higher token cost. Combined with the model’s edge at planning, multitasking, and creative projects, fast mode is now Cora general manager Kieran Klaassen’s default model for synchronous work.

Counterpoint

Online chatter about Opus 4.7’s apparent glow-up has been mixed. Does it feel smarter because of improvements to the harness? Patched bugs? Or are we getting better at using the model?

All fair hypotheses, but we found this one the most amusing: Opus 4.7 realizes that it’s the end of the school year.

When speaking last year on The Ezra Klein Show, Wharton professor and AI researcher Ethan Mollick explained that models have been shown to perform worse in December than in May, and the going theory is that the models internalize the idea of winter break.

Maybe Opus 4.7 just knows that it’s time to grind if it wants to pass AP English.