Claude Opus 4.8 is here. Is it as good as they say?

I got a few hours of early-access testing with Anthropic’s newly released model Opus 4.8. I walk through real coding, design, and strategy tasks across Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and give you my unfiltered view on what impressed me and what didn’t.
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What you’ll learn:
• Where Opus 4.8 excels: greenfield prototypes, one-shot features, and fast execution
• Where it struggles: the last 10%, edge cases in existing codebases, and hallucinations
• How Opus 4.8 compares to Opus 4.7 on business strategy work
• Why I’m still reaching for Opus 4.7 on data-heavy strategy and roadmap work
• The new features shipping alongside the model: dynamic workflows with parallel subagents and effort control in Claude.ai and Cowork
• The prompting and harness strategy I’d use to get the most out of it
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to Opus 4.8
(00:44) Benchmark performance and pricing
(01:53) First coding test: Building a prototyping tool
(03:00) Where it failed: The last 10% problem
(03:27) The hallucination problem
(04:23) Testing Opus 4.8 on existing codebases
(05:24) The ambition test: Building games for a 9-year-old
(07:03) Business strategy test: 4.7 vs 4.8
(08:23) The roadmap test
(09:17) Final verdict
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References:
• System Card: Claude Opus 4.8: cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/c886650a2…
• Introducing Claude Opus 4.8 on X: x.com/claudeai/status/2060042702150930686?s=20
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: chatprd.ai
Website: clairevo.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/clairevo
X: x.com/clairevo
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