In December 2025 I wrote that Claude Opus 4.5 changed everything. I had been using AI coding tools since the beginning. They were useful, but they were also unreliable. The working pattern was defensive: stage every change, review every prompt, stay on feature branches, lean hard on CI, and be ready to roll back. Then I spent serious time with Opus 4.5. What shifted was not that the model suddenly produced perfect software. It still didn’t. What shifted was the economics of my own time. I ...