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. — 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 — 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 — References: • System Card: Claude Opus 4.8: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/c886650a2e96fc0925c805a1a7ca77314ccbf4a6.pdf • Introducing Claude Opus 4.8 on X: [https://x.com/claudeai/status/[redacted card]?s=20](https://x.com/claudeai/status/[redacted card]?s=20) — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [redacted email].