Hands-on: Astra is smart, but Opus 5.5 is more productive for coding
After a large coding project with GPT-6 Astra, the author finds it smart but says Opus 5.5 is the more productive model, expecting Anthropic to keep high-end workload share.
On Anthropic's slowdown: 1. August is the month when most people take a holiday, you would expect token consumption to be lower. However, both OpenAI and Anthropic still produced nice MoM growth. 2. September is the month that OpenAI released Astra. You would expect dollars to shift to Astra to try it out. I did a large coding project with Astra last month. It's definitely a smart model but overall Opus 5.5 is the far more productive and better model to work with. And now Anthropic will release the new Fable. We're still very early when it comes to token demand. My bet is that Anthropic will retain a strong market share when it comes to the most advanced workloads, which is where most of the ARR in this industry will be made. Open-source will be dominant for more commoditized workloads, which is where most of token demand will go, but revenues and margins will be much lower here.
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