Depends in goals. For long free-firm discussions I find Opus 4.7 Adaptive better/deeper than Opus 4.6 Extended. But usual caveats apply: first week of use and token budget seems generous now on Max 5X.
I had the opposite experience. Opus 4.6 extended feels like the first genuinely intelligent model to converse with, Opus 4.7 adaptive feels like slightly smarter LinkedIn slop.
Cursor is what I daily-drive. 4.7 has been terrible for my mostly python-driven work (whereas Opus 4.6 was literally revolutionary to me). Our frontend folks are also complaining.
Of course you don't NEED the better models, but figuring out what model you need can waste a lot of time and effort.
Even when a cheap model is capable of a task it needs a lot more guidance than a more expensive one.
They are also less reliable. You can waste a lot of time cleaning up after them.
Judging whether something is good enough is hard work and rerolling with a more expensive model is painful.
Judging the difficulty of a task ahead of time is very hard. Judging how good a model is for a given task even harder, especially when models and harnesses keep changing all the time.
The real productivity boost LLMs provide is already modest and when you start tinkering with models it can easily evaporate.
1. They heavily subsidized their plans vs. paying for API.
2. They allowed me to use the subscription in every tool I wanted.
3. It covered both Anthropic and OpenAI.
* change laws to accommodate it - if corporations train data, on every usage they should pay higher taxes so they can't exploit the open data, but public ledger trained model is fine to use open data
* similar tech exists (bitcoin, torrent), needs some modifications
Yes, please!
But browsers need to make it easier for things to exist in user space.
That means reviving CSS Houdini, particularly reviving the animation and layout worklets. (It got abandoned because browser vendors (Chrome in particular) found them too difficult to implement. They would need to rearchitect a good chunk of their rendering pipeline. Instead we got a bunch of very limited but easier to implement features like scroll animation timelines)
I tried to use <dialog> and found it to be a pain.
I wanted to close it when clicking outside, but Safari doesn't support closedBy.
Some Safari versions on iOS broke when trying to style my backdrop with tailwind.
The tailwind CSS reset didn't include <dialog>.
I get the allure of just using a position: fixed;
I think cutting the legacy and doing things with the benefit of hindsight would make for a much nicer platform.
For example something like CSS Houdini (making CSS extensible) might have actually happened if browsers where designed for it and would make Web Apps a lot nicer.
1. I think it's pretty clear that the frameworks sold themselves, because it's possible to see the DX benefits with anything beyond a hello world. You don't need Meta's scale. It came from the big companies because they needed it most, not because they are the only ones who benefit.
2. I agree that the frontend-backend split caused a lot of harm and it seems most places are moving on, but it
3. It's a fair assessment that many people don't understand JS well. But it's also a super quirky language with many features that probably should be considered "do-not-use". Things like messing with the prototype chain, purposefully using == instead of === etc.
CSS is even worse. The defaults are weird, which is why everyone uses some form of CSS reset, many things have surprising names and refactoring in a codebase with complex usage of selectors and cascading is a nightmare.
But I wouldn't call people trapped in frameworks. It's pretty easy to switch between React, Svelte, Angular and co.
A) The gone by days of Java Applet's and Flash weren't so snappy either. Our websites also do much more. A tab of Google docs isn't slower or use more memory than a Word instance.
B) No group is ever immune to arrogance. But sure, if you write vanilla JS instead of TS, I'd think that's an odd choice. I'm not saying you can't make good things with Vanilla JS, but I don't see how that makes the Web more "sane".
LLM: When it comes to coding tools LLMs are not so different from humans in what helps them. They benefit just as much from the cleaner control flow of reactive frameworks (compared to jQuery), colocation of JSX and tailwind and typechecking of TS as us humans.
Mess: Has the Web really been such a mess lately? I think most of the messiness is far behind us. JS+HTML5 winning out against Flash and Java, standardization across browsers, XML or HTML.
Was it worse than Microsoft reinventing their Windows UI framework every couple of years?
There are proposals with some traction that would enable webbrowsers to parse TS, but simply ignore the types.
I think it's a bad idea, because tooling handles that perfectly well and I think browsers should generally avoid building functionality that could be equally well provided outside it, but I guess enough people have been asking for it, so it might happen.
