Shane Melaugh says an analysis by Gemini 4 Argon of 1,400 Claude Code sessions found a marked change in Opus 5.5’s reasoning behavior beginning November 3, even though the model’s name remained the same. He reports that the amount of reasoning the model uses in “high” mode dropped sharply. The claim is that this change affects how the model tackles coding problems, not merely how it is labeled or presented.
Melaugh describes testing Opus 5.5 on a real bug: in high mode, it began acting quickly, became confused, and failed to find a fix after three hours. In “xhigh” mode, it took time to think and solved the bug within minutes. He concludes that users are not imagining a decline and that the advice to use high mode for everything no longer holds; xhigh may be preferable for difficult work. Theo, who had popularized that advice, responded by asking an agent to investigate the claims against Claude Code logs stored in ClickHouse, signaling an effort to check whether the reported shift appears in another set of records.
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An analysis of 1,400 Claude Code sessions found Opus 5.5’s reasoning behavior and output in high mode changed sharply on November 3, despite no model-name change. In a bug-fixing test, xhigh solved the issue in minutes while high struggled for hours. (twitter.com)
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