Claude
A frontrunner for reasoning, writing and code, with a focus on safety.
Olya's profile
- What sets it apart
- Claude comes out of Anthropic with a declared obsession for safety: Constitutional AI and public system cards are its signature. The flagship, Opus 4.8, reasons adaptively — spending more time on hard problems — and handles a context window up to 1M tokens, which matters for long documents and whole codebases. In practice it's the AI that tends to stop and ask rather than make things up.
- Strengths
- For long reasoning, careful writing and code it's among the most solid out there: Opus 4.8 ships production-ready code with little oversight and holds up across multi-tool agentic sessions without losing the thread. Its prose quality is excellent, and cross-session memory helps on projects that run for days.
- When to use it
- Reach for it when the task is complex and quality matters more than speed: refactoring real codebases, analysing long documents, editorial writing, agentic workflows. The Pro plan at $20/month includes Claude Code and is the sensible entry point for anyone working with AI every day.
- When to avoid it
- If you just need a few quick answers, the free plan (running on Sonnet 5) or cheaper models are more than enough. Via API, Opus costs $5/$25 per million input/output tokens — at high volume Sonnet or Haiku make more sense. And if you want image or video generation, Claude isn't the place.