This is part of why I switched to Grok 4.5
I don't need more powerful models, I need one that responds fast enough that my attention doesn't wander to other tasks. Grok 4.5 is so fast I can just use it in-band without swapping to other tasks.
Slower than Opus 4.8, which was already miserably slow, is indeed a step in the wrong direction.
After actually using for most of a day now, it really seems not just slightly slower than 4.8, but way slower. Even relatively easy code refactoring tasks seem to take a while.
for you, I am in general not constrained by the speed of models since I parallelize. For me autonomy and accuracy are paramount above all else.
I find that my orchestrating agent still needs to be fast to properly coordinate a fleet of slower models.
During post-training of opus 5, the last few days, opus was a real wreck. I had to swap in gpt 5.6 sol for my orchestrator and enable fast mode (1.5x speed) in order for it to keep up with work and communications from a handful of mostly 5.6 sol agents.
Also because interacting with a slow orchestrator is no fun, even when plenty of work is getting done in parallel in the background.