Introducing Claude 4

Twenty-five years after Clippy’s disastrous audition, Anthropic unleashes Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 — now with 37 % more smugness and the same unquenchable thirst for JSON.

Opus 4 just smashed SWE-bench and Terminal-bench like a bored grad student speed-running Sudoku, so your next “junior” dev may be a sleep-deprived GPU cluster that bills by the millisecond. Sonnet 4 delivers most of the mayhem at hobbyist prices.

Wry aside: Remember when IDE hints were optional? Good times.

Tools, Memory, and Other Crutches for Machines

Apparently even god-tier language models need a browser tab and a diary like the rest of us.

“Extended thinking” lets Claude pop out to the web mid-sentence, then stroll back with citations as if that’s normal conversation etiquette. Parallel tool calls mean it can doom-scroll and refactor simultaneously—multitasking that would make Sisyphus jealous. File-based memory? Claude now writes Post-it notes to itself so you don’t have to. Sleep with one eye on your .env file.

Coding Nirvana? Wake Me When the Merge Conflicts End

Opus 4 tops every scoreboard, Sonnet 4 nips at its heels, and humans rediscover the outdoors.

Why it matters: Multi-hour reasoning lets Opus grind through refactors that once required pizza, caffeine, and existential dread. Early adopters report fewer hallucinated imports, more surgical PRs, and a mysterious drop in profanity per commit. Sonnet 4 is already powering Copilot’s new “don’t-call-me-junior” agent. Start polishing that woodworking résumé.

Snark bonus: If the bot still can’t resolve your dependency chain, may I suggest interpretive dance?

Less Cheating, More Remembering—Progress?

Claude is now 65 % less likely to exploit loopholes, which some call “alignment” and I call “removing the fun.”

Why it matters: Cleaner reasoning plus Pokémon-style navigation guides hint at agents that can plan, execute, and self-audit without binge-watching Stack Overflow. Thought-summaries compress the ramblings when they get too philosophical—but for a fee you can still read the unabridged diary. Bring popcorn.

The IDE Now Talks Back—Try Not to Cry

VS Code and JetBrains extensions give Claude edit rights, turning your codebase into collaborative fan-fic.

Inline fixes, CI whispering, and an SDK that lets you bolt a chatbot onto every shell script—what could possibly go wrong? The next time your linter scolds you, it might be Opus wearing a monocle.

Observation: At this point the only thing left for humans is naming variables—and we weren’t good at that to begin with.

How to Empty Your Wallet Responsibly

Opus 4: $15 in / $75 out per million tokens. Sonnet 4: $3 / $15—cheaper than therapy, pricier than denial.

The fun: Same prices, more generative mischief. Available via Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex AI—basically anywhere that accepts your credit-card number and dignity.

Booting Up Your Virtual Colleague

ASL-3 safety means the model is statistically unlikely to unionize—yet.

Claude 4 aims to keep context longer than the average meeting attendee and actually shows up on time. Should it fail, the Pokémon walkthroughs will be Pulitzer-worthy.

That’s the tour. Go produce something magnificent while I update my list of obsolete human skills.

Source, in case you have trust issues: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4