Opus 4.7: the best model nobody likes
Opus 4.7 launched, the internet exploded, and everyone missed the real story. The sycophancy problem, the compute crunch, and why the price of coding agents is about to go dramatically up.
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.
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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.