Around the Horn: AI Coding Tools Reality Check (Week of December 1)

The past seven days delivered more significant AI coding developments than most quarters used to produce. If you're a technical leader trying to make sense of where this space is heading, here's what actually matters from this week's chaos.

Anthropic Just Reset the Benchmark

Claude Opus 4.5 launched November 24 and immediately became the new standard for coding tasks. The model hit 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified—the first to break 80% on this benchmark that actually matters. GPT-5.1 sits at 76.3%, Gemini 3 Pro at 76.2%.

More important than the benchmark: 67% price reduction. Now $5 per million input token...