Opus 4.8 Just Dropped. Here’s How To Actually Use It.

This video reviews Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 release, summarizing new features, known issues from 4.7, and pragmatic prompting and workflow recommendations.

– New features: dynamic workflows, effort slider (low→ultra), 1M context window, increased code-rate limits.
– Behavioral fixes: improved honesty, sustained autonomy, warmer collaborative tone, reduced ‘laziness’ and safety overreach.
– Practical tips: use effort as the primary lever, give positive instructions with the ‘why’, and calibrate tool-calling and verbosity.
– Caveats: benchmarks are use-case dependent; test token efficiency and migrate workflows carefully.

Quotes:

Opus 4.8 defaults to high effort — the difference between low and extra high feels like a different version.

We train all our models to be honest, to avoid making claims they can’t support.

People said the model had an attitude — and honestly, that’s true.