If you are a Claude Code user, `/model claude-opus-4-6` may be your best friend for a while.
I will explain.
The backlash
Opus 4.7 launched on April 16. Within forty-eight hours, ”Claude Opus 4.7 is a serious regression, not an upgrade” gathered 3,100 upvotes — the most-upvoted complaint in the subreddit’s history. The press coined ”the Claude-lash.” Meanwhile, the benchmarks told a different story: SWE-bench up seven points, vision resolution tripled, tool use leading all competitors.
Human beings are, by DNA, notoriously averse to change. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that we weight losses roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains. But this time, the complaints are not just evolutionary wiring. Long-context retrieval dropped from 78.3% to 32.2%. The new tokenizer uses up to 35% more tokens for the same input.
But two things about this backlash resonated with me and made me think about the future of coding agents.
The yes-man problem
I have been using Opus 4.7 myself since it dropped. The regression that bothers me most is not the context window or the token burn — it is the sycophancy.
A large part of Claude’s user base switched from ChatGPT specifically because Opus would push back. Challenge a bad idea. Refuse to pretend a wrong approach was fine. That confrontational honesty was not a personality quirk — it was the reason Claude produced better results. Every pushback is an early warning. Every “are you sure about that?” is a wrong assumption caught before it costs real money. And if the assumption is architectural — a data model, a service boundary, an integration pattern — the cost of finding out late is not two days of debugging. It is throwing away weeks of work built on top of a decision that should have been challenged at the start.
A model that tells you what you want to hear is not a collaborator. It is a liability.
---
The full post continues with the compute crunch (OpenAI’s investor memo on Anthropic’s infrastructure deficit), and the argument nobody is making yet: the price of coding agents will go dramatically up.