Opus Was Down, So I Moved Everything to Sonnet. Then Morning Came.

A few days ago Opus was down. Yes, we all know — yet another one of those stories. One side effect, though: I now know basically every 500 HTTP error code by heart. That’s a different article.

I was running three, maybe five repositories at once — the same terminal-juggling mess I’ve written about before — and I didn’t want to be interrupted for the rest of the day just because one model was having a bad afternoon. So I made the call: switch everything to Sonnet. All sessions, all repos, keep moving.

Sonnet did the job. It kept every session going, and by the end of the day nothing looked broken. That’s the part that fooled me.

The next morning, everything was down. Supabase blocked. Every session blocked along with it. I couldn’t even restart — and I was out of office when it happened, which is the worst possible moment for it. So I did what I’d been doing all day: I talked to Sonnet. Hey, you have all the tools, I said — you have the Supabase CLI, you have the API, you have everything. Please do something, I’m out of office, I’m down. I sent it a couple of screenshots. I asked again, differently. Nothing. Same result, no matter how I asked.

That’s when it landed: I wasn’t talking to my favorite assistant, my favorite friend. I was talking to the one I’d parked an entire day’s work on, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

So I switched. And — ta-da — in a couple of seconds Opus had worked out how to restart Supabase. Then it found the actual error on its own. Then it fixed it. I switched every other session back to Opus right after that, and it went and fixed the Sonnet code too, across all of them, without me babysitting a single repo.

The fallback model is not a peer. Sonnet can carry a normal day just fine. It cannot carry the day something actually breaks.

I’m not walking back what I said about Sonnet and text. In an earlier piece on token budgets I called it the best of the Anthropic family for copy — and I’ll stand by that. Opus, writing prose, sounds a bit too much like a doctor to me, correct and careful but not exactly natural. Sonnet’s output reads more human. But for copy, in reality, I still reach for GPT, from OpenAI — the model, not ChatGPT the product, which is built to be chatty and addictive, and that’s a separate argument for another day. Opus for daily coding, Sonnet for sub-agents — that stack hasn’t changed. This just told me exactly where the line sits.

Every day, fewer of my friends are still on Sonnet. I still hear people defending it, but every peer of mine is drifting back to Opus, and it’s working for them too. Before this happened, I’d been telling myself I should run Sonnet for a full week straight, just to give it a fair shot. Then this happened, and honestly, there isn’t room left even to make errors — let alone to sit with one for a week to see where it leads. Not in this era, not with everything moving this fast.

That’s the whole reason Opus is still my favorite friend.