> but as any user knows they are top tier at instruction following, highly reliable and predictable

This is spot on. Reliability is really the #1 priority for me when it comes to coding agents, and Sonnet, and especially Opus, really deliver on it. It makes such a huge difference when it comes to agents. Anthropic really nailed it on this.

My process has become: get Opus to generate a plan, use o3 to help me review the plan, and then get Opus to implement the plan. This works extremely well for me, and is the first time where I've felt AI being actually useful for coding anything more than small prototypes.