Opus 5.5 on xhigh ships frontends that no longer look like a SaaS template
A video shows a live page generated by Opus 5.5 on the xhigh setting, with the post describing the build workflow and cost figures from the model's first two days.
Claude Opus 5.5 on xhigh is now shipping sites that no longer look like the purple SaaS template. The video is one example. Not a moodboard. A live page. The model dropped on September 22. $4 / $20 per million tokens. On typical work it runs about 40% cheaper than Opus 5 and more than 30% faster. Intelligence sits near Fable 5.1. People are not running leaderboards with it. They are running frontends. xhigh (effort above high, below max) is not “think longer.” It is the setting where type, grid, and micro-motion hold, and the model stops defaulting to Inter plus a gradient. How this is being built two days after launch: 1. Claude Code plus the Frontend Design skill. The skill picks a direction first (riso, terminal, brutalist, editorial), then writes code. Skip the skill and the template comes back. 2. One self-contained HTML file. CSS and JS inline. That is how the 100-page gallery was made: 20 Opus 5.5 agents, five pages each, rendered at 1440 and 390, accepted from screenshots. 3. One strong landing page treated as a system, not as “make it look like this.” Grid, rhythm, CTA rules get extracted. New pages reuse the rules. 4. xhigh only for polish. Medium for structure. xhigh for motion, 3D scroll, noise, hover states. Otherwise tokens burn for nothing. What is already public: - 100 standalone HTML pages: aurora glass, cyberpunk market, Swiss poster machine, neo-brutal zine, a terminal with a boot screen - a scrollable 3D city with water and lanterns from OpenDesign tests - one-shot landings in 2–11 minutes, versus three passes on Opus 5 - “$10k site, no code” walkthroughs pairing Opus 5.5 with references and generated assets One caveat. On Opus 5, designers in blind tests liked the mood and the copy and still killed the finish: contrast, block length, broken sections. Win rate sat at 31%. With 5.5 the talk moved from “almost real” to “show the client after one pass.” This does not replace an art director. It compresses reference -> working HTML from 2–3 days to one evening. Taste plus a system gets you a page. “Make it pretty” still gets slop, just faster. If you build it yourself: lock the direction and the bans first (no Inter, no purple gradients), medium for the skeleton, xhigh for motion
This post quotes another post: “Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5 model”