The model itself is excellent, the defaults are bad. As Simon and other pointed out, medium is great.
Reminds me of Gemma4 and the official (or at least popularly used around launch) Jinja templates being wrong and broken for tool calling.
The model itself is excellent, the defaults are bad. As Simon and other pointed out, medium is great.
Reminds me of Gemma4 and the official (or at least popularly used around launch) Jinja templates being wrong and broken for tool calling.
Seems less like "bad"/broken defaults and more defaults tuned to the max for benchmarks.
All the positive PR from "Opus 4.6 level" online buzz is well worth the minor annoyance from taking a half hour to solve a simple problem since a user just needs to turn down the reasoning knob if it bothers them.
It’s both: The default is bad, but not by accident. Since they certainly chose this default intentionally to be evaluated by it, they entirely brought it upon themselves for it to be evaluated as slow, overthinking and overcomplicating things.
It’s a similar level of dishonesty as trying to conflate “starts at” vs. “tested configuration” car prices.
We change the incentive to do this by evaluating it exactly as advertised.