# Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

42 Hacker News commenters recommended Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for coding, writing and long autonomous tasks; critics say output quality degrades as context fills, and cost is high.

## Why people recommend it

- Strong at generating and writing code (6 comments): "there is no way Claude Code/Open Code with any modern model isn't able to generate a one hundred line script on the first try" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325984)) "Models such as Sonnet or Opus 4.5 can generate thousands of lines of code per hour." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46324453)) "faster, generally feels like a better coder, and make much prettier TUI/FEs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241471))
- Handles long sessions without compaction (4 comments): "This is fantastic. I keep having to save to memory with instructions and then tell it to restore to get anywhere on long running tasks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372467)) "I'm very happy about this change. For long sessions with Claude it was always like a punch to the gut when a compaction came along." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376923)) "finally. before 1m, i must speak 60k context for just telling the past chat and project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47375464))
- Preferred over other models (5 comments): "As long as I have access to GPT models or Sonnet/Opus, I never want to use Gemini." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47076424)) "I want to let it handle tricky stuff where other models can't address." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502399)) "Anthropic has nailed that Opus > Sonnet > Haiku." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275162))
- Reliable with few bugs (3 comments): "Anything past that from those two have been bug-free" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000380)) "Very very rarely does the model fall off the rails." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46257490)) "opus/sonnet had 0 problems with parens and types" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48082466))

## What people warn about

- Quality degrades as context fills (8 comments): "Context decay is real though — I've noticed quality dropping toward the end of long inputs even when the relevant text is there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381495)) "context still rots at the same rate. 90k tokens consumed has just as bad results in 100k context window or 1M" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371940)) "I felt like it was slower and generally worse than using 200K with context compaction" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47377878))
- Output still needs checking (2 comments): "the latest Opus/Sonnet models are...ok. But there's still a lot left to be desired." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47229404)) "Reading the tool calls Claude does while thinking shows a lot of trial and error" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159340))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend
- [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://claude.ai/login)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6", https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus-4-6-and-sonnet-4-6/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).