I got a few hours of early-access testing with Anthropic’s newly released model Opus 4.8. I walk through real coding, design, and strategy tasks across Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and give you my unfiltered view on what impressed me and what didn’t. — What you’ll learn: 1. Where Opus 4.8 excels: greenfield prototypes, one-shot features, and fast execution 2. Where it struggles: the last 10%, edge cases in existing codebases, and hallucinations 3. How Opus 4.8 compares to Opus 4.7 on business strategy work 4. Why I’m still reaching for Opus 4.7 on data-heavy strategy and roadmap work 5. The new features shipping alongside the model: dynamic workflows with parallel subagents and effort control in Claude.ai and Cowork 6. The prompting and harness strategy I’d use to get the most out of it — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Opus 4.8  (00:44) Benchmark performance and pricing (01:53) First coding test: Building a prototyping tool (03:00) Where it failed: The last 10% problem (03:27) The hallucination problem (04:23) Testing Opus 4.8 on existing codebases (05:24) The ambition test: Building games for a 9-year-old (07:03) Business strategy test: 4.7 vs 4.8 (08:23) The roadmap test (09:17) Final verdict — References: • System Card: Claude Opus 4.8: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/c886650a2e96fc0925c805a1a7ca77314ccbf4a6.pdf [https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/c886650a2e96fc0925c805a1a7ca77314ccbf4a6.pdf] • Introducing Claude Opus 4.8 on X: https://x.com/claudeai/status/2060042702150930686?s=20 [https://x.com/claudeai/status/2060042702150930686?s=20] — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ [https://www.chatprd.ai/] Website: https://clairevo.com/ [https://clairevo.com/] LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/] X: https://x.com/clairevo [https://x.com/clairevo] — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/ [https://penname.co/]. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.