I don't doubt Opus is technically superior, but it's not practically superior for me.
It's still pretty much impossible to have any LLM one-shot a complex implementation. There's just too many details to figure out and too much to explain for it to get correct. Often, there's uncertainty and ambiguity that I only understand the correct answer (or rather less bad answer) after I've spent time deep in the code. Having Opus spit out a possibly correct solution just isn't useful to me. I need to understand _why_ we got to that solution and _why_ it's a correct solution for the context I'm working in.
For me, this means that I largely have an iteratively driven implementation approach where any particular task just isn't that complex. Therefore, Sonnet is completely sufficient for my day-to-day needs.
I've been having a great time with Windsurf's "Planning" feature. Have a nice discussion with Cascade (Claude) all about what it is that neerds to happen - sometimes a very long conversation including test code. Then when everything is very clear, make it happen. Then test and debug the results with all that context. Pretty nice.
In Zed I switch the AI panel to ask mode and chat with the agent about different approaches and have it draft patches. Then when I think there's a design worth trying, switch to Write mode and have it implement that change + run the tests and diagnostics to verify the code at least compiles, tests pass and follows our style guides. Finally a line by line review + review of the test coverage (in terms of interface surface area) before submitting a PR for another human review.
After watching a few videos trying to understand how people were using LLMs and getting useful results I found that even making a simpler version of the fancy planning mode in the LLM IDEs via the instructions.md produced hugely better productivity gains.
I started adding an instruction file along the lines of "Always tell me your plan to solve the issue first with short example code, never edit files without explicit confirmation of your plan" at the start and it is like a day and night difference in how useful it becomes. It also starts to feel like programming again where you can read through various files and instead of thinking in your head, you write out your thoughts. You end up getting confirmation or push back on errors that you can clean up.
Reading through a sort of wrong sort of right implementation spread across various files after every prompt just really sucked.
I'm not one shotting massive amounts of files, but I am enjoying the lack of grunt work.
I use Claude Code frequently for doing constrained tasks in the BG while I'm working other issues. I love it's planning mode switch. It is so much better to identity a dead-end before Claude confidently charges off a cliff.
That's essentially what I do, but that doesn't (and cannot) entirely solve the problem.
A major part of software engineering is identifying and resolving issues during implementation. Plans are a good outline of what needs to be done, but they're always incomplete and inaccurate.
It's still pretty much impossible to have any LLM one-shot a complex implementation. There's just too many details to figure out and too much to explain for it to get correct. Often, there's uncertainty and ambiguity that I only understand the correct answer (or rather less bad answer) after I've spent time deep in the code. Having Opus spit out a possibly correct solution just isn't useful to me. I need to understand _why_ we got to that solution and _why_ it's a correct solution for the context I'm working in.
For me, this means that I largely have an iteratively driven implementation approach where any particular task just isn't that complex. Therefore, Sonnet is completely sufficient for my day-to-day needs.