For coding Opus 4.5 in q3 2025 was still the best model I've used.

Since then it's just been a cycle of the old model being progressively lobotomised and a "new" one coming out that if you're lucky might be as good as the OG Opus 4.5 for a couple of weeks.

Subjective but as far as I can tell no progress in almost a year, which is a lifetime in 2022-25 LLM timelines

Another annoyance (for more API use) is summarized/hidden reasoning traces. It makes prompt debugging and optimization much harder, since you literally don't have much visibility into the real thinking process.