Opus 5.5 and the limit that stopped ending the day

The most useful thing about Opus 5.5, for me, is that I have stopped planning my day around a limit.

Before, I would get about three hours of actual work out of any five-hour window before hitting one, and the weekly allowance was gone by Thursday. Since switching I have not hit a single limit. I work in Opus 5.5 almost exclusively (the next Fable is the one I am actually waiting for) and I no longer think about limits at all, which is a strange thing to say about a constraint that used to shape my entire week.

Two things changed at the same time though, and I cannot separate them from the inside. Anthropic's figures for the 22 September release have the model costing about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical workloads and producing output more than 30% faster. The same launch raised the five-hour limits on the subscription plans. So what I am experiencing is some mixture of a cheaper model and a bigger allowance.

Which is the part worth saying. For a solo developer the binding constraint was how many hours a day I could actually use the model before being told to come back later. The benchmarks moved too, but the benchmarks are not what changed my week.

A model I have stopped budgeting for is worth more to me than a model that scores two points higher.

Source: Anthropic, Introducing Claude Opus 5.5