Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.8
Editing a draft Opus 4.8 wrote
- Run the linter and act on its em-dash, triad and flat-certainty flags. They hit on Opus 4.8 prose, unlike Opus 5's.
- Read the last sentence of every paragraph. Opus 4.8 ends most of them on a maxim (entry 12): We optimized the case that was already fine and taxed the case we cared about. Delete it unless it states a new fact.
- Find the running metaphor. Opus 4.8 introduces one image and reuses it across paragraphs (entries 37 and 27): a fixed tax on every request, then Redis tax three paragraphs later. Replace it with the mechanism it names.
- Strip bolded labels that restate their list item (entry 29): Misses pay for the lookup twice.
Editing a draft Opus 4.6 wrote
Run the general pass; it stages less than later Opus models. Check for Title Case headers (entry 30) and the em-dash reversal the cache isn't a cache—it's a new dependency (entries 2 and 16).
Running the pass as Opus 4.x
Not observed separately. Apply the editor rules in opus-5.md.
Evidence: oaustegard/experiments model-register-drift/ (one Opus 4.6 and two
Opus 4.8 samples, one prompt).