I Did Nothing and Opus 4.8 Rebuilt My App

0:00Yay, Opus 4.8 just came out and all the benchmarks look amazing. Wow, that sounds great, but has anyone actually used it in real production use? Has anyone actually shipped anything with it? In today's video, we're going to be using Opus 4.8 to refactor our codebase for the Magic Hand, which is a real estate AI photo editing app that we built. And we're going to see and put it through its paces to see how it handles, how it ships new features, and how I use Claude just in general in my day-to-day workflow. So, specifically the features that they released are dynamic workflows, effort control, and the messages API. We're going to be trying these new features out inside of Claude code. Let's get right into it. So, here is the app that I built and I wanted to do just basic refactor of like anything that we can do to make this app better.

0:47And we're going to be using the power of Opus 4.8 to basically have it go through the whole repository just to see how it can make the app better from just simple prompt caching or making the images load faster, simple fixes, and maybe some errors and security fixes that we haven't seen, you know, by using Opus 4.7. Maybe it catches some new things that we hadn't seen. So, this is the Magic Hand. This is what we're going to be working on. And if anyone's wondering, here is the analytics dashboard on Polar for the Magic Hand and it's made about $700. But that's with me not doing any advertising. So, let's get into it and let's see how we can use Opus 4.8 just to make some changes and see how it works, see how long it takes. And just to give you some perspective on where I'm at with usage, I'm in my current session with still an

1:33hour and 20 minutes left. I have only used 7% and we have some pretty good usage amounts here. I am on the $200 month plan. So, we are going to see how much I can change in my app and see how much it costs for those changes. Journey with just a really basic simple prompt. We're just going to ask Opus to make our app 100 times better in any way possible. I think this is a great first step just to see how it thinks through the code base, what it brings up, what it finds, any vulnerabilities, maybe any some some optimization errors that are going on in the landing page. I'm interested. So, the first thing we're going to do is hit forward slash and we're going to type in effort. This is going to bring up the ultra code. This

2:19is what people are freaking out about. Oh my goodness, I can launch parallel agents, hundreds of them. But, keep in mind this is going to max out your token usage. You're probably going to be able to hit your limits so much faster using this because it just uses so much more reasoning effort and token consumption. Like I said, I'm on the $200 a month plan, but let's see how this works with this prompt initiated. So, I'm just going to say review the code base, please find any way possible that we can make this app a hundred times better. I want you to develop a plan. I want you to report back and see if there's any way we could make our web app, the magic hand, a hundred times better. And we're going to just send it. So, like I said, the feature I was just talking about is

3:04the dynamic workflows feature. It says this new feature is available in research preview and allows Claude to take on even bigger tasks in Claude code. Claude can plan the work and then run hundreds of parallel sub agents in a single session. So, if you go here, it goes more in detail. I highly recommend giving this information to your agent. Whether you're on open Claude or Hermes or whatever, just to be able to help you synthesize and understand the information better because there's a lot to go through here, but it is super important for builders to understand how to use these tools effectively to be able to build and ship properly. You don't need to understand every single thing that's happening on a code base. I mean, who even codes anymore? And if you are, God bless your soul. But, we really need to understand the concepts. Like,

3:50how do these work? How do they connect to each other? So, understanding how to use dynamic workflows in the right situation is going to help you save a ton of money from token spend and allow you to just put yourself in the right position to be able to be a efficient builder. So, dynamic workflows in action, code-base wide bug hunts, and profiler guided optimization audits. That is exactly what we're doing. So, it's working in the background right now. I'm interested to see how long it's going to take. It's only been a couple minutes. Let's check on Opus and see if it hasn't already gone off the rails. Okay, this is the first thing it brought up. It says, "I'll start by scouting the code base to understand its current state, then orchestrate a comprehensive multi-dimensional review. Let me explore the structure

4:35first." So, we're just going to go ahead and let it do its thing. Keep in mind, we are using the ultra code feature. I usually, when I'm just shipping simple features, I'm just using Opus on high. I just feel like doing it any more costs a lot of tokens and takes a long time. If you're going to be shipping a simple button fix or changing the color of your landing page, you can get away with it just being on medium. I'm also interested to see how the fast mode works. Even though it is two times faster, it is going to cost us a lot more. So, I'm going to be interested in seeing how the timing runs on that. Okay, so it came back, "The app is far bigger than the Claude markdown file suggests. Full video into generation, social media post generation, affiliate systems, BullMQ workers, the works."

5:21Yeah, we are on Railway for a lot of the back-end infrastructure. So, it is deployed at the magichand.io, and then it's going to read the core data model, AI pipeline, and business model just to give us a review. And so far, it's been working for 1 and 1/2 minutes. All right, all right, let's see. I now have a clear picture. The magichand is a mature, deployed, monetized SaaS, far bigger than the Claude MD implies. So, it just goes over like all of the features, remotion, and everything. That's one thing I'm going to test out, too. I'm going to have it create a remotion promotional video for us and just see how it does because remotion takes a little finessing to get the video dialed in, but I've seen some good clips on 4.8 doing a good job with the remotion skill. So, here we go. A 100x better plan deserves a real multi-angle

6:08investigation rather than a single read. Since Ultra Code is on, I'll orchestrate a workflow deep code grounded analysis across across eight dimensions in three web research streams in parallel, then synthesis adversarial critique, and then integration into a prioritized roadmap. Let me launch it. Let's go, baby. And it also came across a few things. Um, you know, we can watch live progress in the forward slash workflows, which is nice. I'll get notified automatically when it finishes, but I just wanted to bring this up, too, because I think the details are important. It says, "While that runs, a few things I already noticed from my own scout that the agents are now validating in depth. The photo workspace TSX file is 2,163 lines, six times our own 350-line rule

6:57which we have in place. So, several other workspace files are 1,100 lines of code. Three parallel bulk processes implementations, bulk process, bulk process parallel, and bulk process queue likely duplicate dead code worth consolidating. And there's no test suite, cloud markdown references npm test, but there's no test script. Branding drift. Yeah, we got to update that. Pricing tension, credit packs. Um, yeah, we got to check that out. The margins are really good on this app. I can't wait to advertise it and show you guys how we set up Hermes to build out the marketing. We already have emails going out via Resend API to hundreds of real estate agents, but we're also going to be building out a social media automation with Hermes for this app, as well. But, it's going to work through the workflow. I love it. It's a great time to be alive. Let's ride. Keep in

7:43mind, we've only been working here for 2 minutes and 30 seconds and it's already burned through 500,000 tokens. Wow. Just wanted to show you what the app actually does. Like, it just basically is an AI photo editor for real estate agents. So, as far as like what the app does is it transforms really bad listing photos, like something like this, to something like this. So, essentially real estate agents can just drag and drop their photos and just come in here and, you know, a lot of photos with power lines and come in here and just get them removed and get the grass greened up a little bit. I think that looks a lot better, don't you think? Also, too, we have a magic hand feature where all they have to do is drag and drop their photos in and hit the magic hand and then hit process

8:28photos and then they come back and get notified via email. Usually takes about 2 minutes a photo. So, if they're doing 25 photos, they'll come back, get notified in an hour. All their photos have been automatically edited and done for them. So, that's the gist of the app. It's not a promotional video or anything, but just to give you some context on what this app actually does. There you go. Now you know. Also, wanted to bring up how exactly this dynamic workflow actually works because understanding how it works gives you some insight on how it's happening behind the scenes. So, it's working right now, but I wanted to just break down. All this is going to be linked down below, by the way. But essentially, when a workflow kicks off, Claude plans dynamically based on the prompt and then it's breaking it up into subtask and fans the work out across multiple

9:15sub-agents running in parallel. And those results are checked before they're folded in. So, we have essentially sub-agents that report back to an orchestrator agent. This is the new phenomenon of having agents check agents' work. This is going to be key for workflows if you're building and if you don't have this happening, what are you doing? You're still going to need a human in the loop. I'm sorry to say, you still need a human to review these changes before you push it to production. And you also need an agent that checks other agents' work to make sure it completed and worked. So, that's what we're doing and seeing right here, right now. Dynamic workflows are built in parallel and long-running work that can extend into hours and days doing the most complex engineering work that

10:00previously would have taken weeks. And then the progress is saved as the run goes. So, essentially their biggest headline feature in this whole thing was four times less the mistakes that essentially 4.7 made that now occur less frequently in 4.8. I don't even know if that made sense, but it just makes less mistakes and it actually lets you know when mistakes happen, which is really nice. So, it says, you know, basically that, you know, the misaligned behavior, you could see Opus 4.7 and then Opus 4.8. By the way, too, I wanted to squeeze this in here. Did you guys know that Mythos is going to be literally released in 2 weeks? It says it right here. People just forgot about this or glazed over

10:45it. We're making swift progress on developing these safeguards and expect to be able to bring Mythos class models to all our customers in the coming weeks. Do you realize what's going to be happening now if you're building with AI? This whole market is going to go crazy. Okay, we are out 8 minutes in and it has burned over 800,000 tokens. So, 8 and 1/2 minutes in and we burned 726,000 tokens. Let's just let it cook. We could be here for a couple weeks. We'll see. Also, another thing, too, when you're using this new dynamic workflows, there's a new thing called auto mode. It will ask you if you want to switch to auto mode. It says workflows work best when auto mode is on. Essentially, it's just going to automatically approve all

11:30the changes that is going to preview to you before it actually pushes it to production. Very helpful. Okay, you could see here that says dynamic workflow multi-agent review on the magic hand is completed. It took 33 minutes. So, I knew it was going to take a long time, and it worked using 14 agents and 1.2 million tokens. Wow. So, 34 minutes of parallel work. The result is large. Let me extract the synthesis, critique, and final integrated plan from the output file. It says the review is solid and even self-corrected. The critique caught two agent overreaches and the integrator fixed them. Let me save the full plan as a reference doc and then give you the report. So, 86 findings across eight dimensions. Eight are

12:15critical, 34 are high, and then it's going to write the canonical plan document and report back. Let's take a look at this plan. The magic hand 100X plan TLDR. You've built a financially well-engineered skeleton wrapped around a quietly accredited full listing marketed suite. 26 tables, photo cleanup, image to video re-motion compilation, AI social brand kit, done-for-you service, but two truths dominate everything else. They are live exploitable security billing holes that can end the company on one single disclosure. They are cheap to fix. Do this now before anything else. It says you have 26 tables of a product and zero evidence anyone repeatedly pays for the bundle. The 100X became the AI listing

13:02marketing engine. Thesis is correct in spirit, but it is currently an assumption. Validate demand before building the next feature. The 100X is orchestration, distribution, and trust, not the new net AI generation, which anyone can rent. Yeah, nano banana. Photo cleaner of itself is racing to zero. Showcase now bundle staging free. Exactly. So, current state verdict, and here's the honest I I love great review. I built this in August of last year, by the way. Strong financial integrity discipline, atomic credit deducts, GTE guards, and a genuinely differentiated service, live exploitable security holes. So, this is great. The In I had ran something similar as far as the prompt that we gave 4.8 with 4.7, and it

13:51did not even come close to this type of detail. Phase zero is stop the bleeding. Five live failures, all verified in the code. So, photo versions, unauthenticated at Kai callbacks, public R2 bucket of home interiors. So, couple things there, the 100X vision. It says the job stops being edit a photo and becomes launch a listing and win more business. Priced on an agent's RLA, not ROI, not per image. Each brokerage becomes a near-zero customer acquisition cost channel for hundreds of agents, and every accept-reject correction quietly compounds into a self-improving engine. This is amazing. Really nice job here. So, we don't have to go through it all,

14:36but this is really good. I'm going to have it start making the fixes. It did take a long time. I am interested to see how much usage it had to used in my Claude account. So, let's check that out. All right, so you could see here we're at 9%. Oh, woah, 16% used. Um does reset in 19 minutes, which, you know, for being on the $200 a month plan, um that's still not bad. It's still working in the background making those fixes and updates now. I want to go ahead, and after it does that, I want to try the fast mode feature, which they are talking about here. So, as one of the features, the effort control. So, a new control alongside the model selector lets you choose how much effort Claude puts into a response. So, high effort,

15:21Claude will think more frequently and more deeply to give you better responses and low-effort. So, there is a fast plan in here somewhere. We need to test that out and just see how much of tokens it uses. Got it, right here. So, it says we did the dynamic workflows and it says in fast mode for Opus 48 where the model can now work at two and a half the speed and is now three times cheaper than it was versus previous models. Awesome. I want to take a minute to go over what is inside of our Shipping School community because we go over these model releases every single week. We just did a Codex course going through Codex workflows, setting up Codex, and getting your first AI agent running. This is a 24-week syllabus that we are in the middle of right now where we're just making basically big breaking down the basics.

16:06What is AI? Prompt and context engineering, software basics, API calls. We go over things like Superbase, Codex, Vercel, Hermes agent, Open Claw, customer support agents, simple automation, content agents. We go over what is MCP, business dashboards, local LLMs if you want to actually fine-tune a local model and get it running on local hardware. We have a class on that. We go into what is AI inference and inference engineering. We go to embeddings and memory, Evals, security, and then a capstone build and capstone demos to finish it off. We have four teachers in the group. And if you're looking to get into AI and get better at building with AI, I'll put the link to the group down below. You get access to an Open Claw course, a Claude Code course, and everything here that you see in this

16:51syllabus. Come join the party. Come build with other builders. We have over 150 people in the group. And like I said, check out the link down below. Now, back to the video. Okay, now I'm in a new terminal here and I want to test out the fast mode. So, you just hit forward /fast and that's going to open up toggling fast mode for Opus 4.8. And it does say high-speed mode for Opus 48 draws from usage credits at a higher rate. Separate rate limits apply. So, fast mode being on is 10 mil $10 per million input, $50 per million output, which is pretty crazy. And then we can learn more here on what this actually does, which would be good to confirm on how it all works. So, even though fast mode sounds exciting, speed up responses with fast

17:37mode, it's going to cost a lot. And that's why we're going to test it out just to see if it's actually worth it. Fast mode in a high-speed configuration for Claude Opus, making the model 2 and 1/2 times faster at the higher cost per token. So, we toggled it on. Fast mode is not a different model. It uses Opus with a different API configuration that prioritizes speed over cost efficiency. So, we get the identical quality and capabilities with faster responses. Fast mode is supported on Opus 4.8. So, we're going to check it out. What to know, it just says how much it costs, and we are on the $200 month plan, and how we toggled it. So, by default, fast mode persists across sessions, which is pretty cool, and we enabled it. And there is a good cost trade-off, that's for sure. And it just says like when to

18:23use fast mode. Fast mode is best for interactive work, where response latency matters the most more than cost. So, rapid iteration on code changes, live debugging sessions, time-sensitive work with tight deadlines. Standard mode is better for just long autonomous tasks where speed matters less, like what we just did in the previous fix. It took 35 minutes. Um so, fast mode versus effort level. It just says fast mode and effort level both affect response speed, but differently. So, fast mode, same model quality, lower latency, but higher cost. Lower effort level is less thinking time, faster responses, but potentially lower quality on complex tasks. So, it says you can combine both, use fast mode with a lower effort level for maximum speed on straightforward tasks. Cool. So, let's go ahead and try that now.

19:09Okay, this is pretty crazy, and this is the fastest I've ever seen Opus operate, but I basically just asked, "Can you check if the Remotion skills installed? I would like to use it. If not, install it so we can make a video of the magic hand." This literally came back to me in 5 seconds. So, it had checked the code base, found it, and it says it's ready to go. We'll just let it let it run live so you can see how fast it is. So, Remotion is already installed, and there's an existing magic hand promo composition. Let me look at what's already there. Okay, cool. So, the magic hand promo is already built and previously rendered. What would you like to? I would like to completely redesign the video with new assets and just show it in a different way with new animations, new motions, new swipes, new

19:54vector graphics, whatever you need. Let me know if you need any screenshots from the app, or do you have some that you can already use? Just redesign the video. A complete redesign, love it. Before I design, let me inventory exactly what raw material I already have to work with. That's the thing with Remotion is if you're building a promotional video, you need to give it as much context as possible. Screenshots, every part of your dashboard, how your app works, every little button, every little functionality that you want to show off so we can actually build a proper promo video. So, it says, "I can tell you what's covered and everything I would want from you." So, it's going to go ahead and search. I'm just going to let it run in real time just so you can kind of get a good idea how fast it works. We are on the high effort level, so you could go to medium or low to even get it

20:40faster, but you could see it's cranking right now. So, it has 19 before and after pairs, multiple logo variants, before and after shots. Cool. Let's Let's just let it rip. Let's see. While it's doing that, this is literally like the first version of the landing page that I built for the magic hand. While it does look okay, it still has that vibe coded feel. I just wanted to test out to see the capability of Opus 4.8 and just without using any skills or anything, just see how it performs out of the box as far as redesigning the landing page completely. Let's just see how it does. So, I'm just going to go ahead and open up another terminal, fire up Claude. Okay, so while it's doing

21:25that, the video finished, so it redesigned and completely re-rendered the whole video and we're going to check that out, but while that's finishing rendering, we're going to actually just have it work in the background while we check out that video. So, I want you to completely redesign the Magic Hand landing page. I want you to use modern architecture. I want you to really be creative and create a lots of motion and create a design that is going to stop the scroll and as well as make the website built for real estate agents. So, take what you see of the current landing page and completely redesign it. Use the same assets, use the same copy,

22:10but completely redesign the components and the layout. We're also going to take fast mode off for this. Then we're going to let it cook. All right, let's check this out. This is just one shot and I didn't do anything. Looking pretty good. Looking pretty good. Wow. Wow. Wow. That's incredible. I really love how it just put those photos together. It's doing great. Oh my goodness. This is just one shot and y'all I'm pretty shocked on how well it's doing just in took 3 minutes to put this together. Very nice. I mean, obviously you're going to tweak it a little bit and make some changes. I can upload some photos of the dashboard and some other things that actually shows off the hero feature, but pretty impressed that it just put it together in just a few minutes. This is something that is actually usable. Okay, now back to the redesigning of the landing page. It says

22:55all start by boring the current Magic Hand landing page and the standard structure assets and copy before redesigning it. So, let's let it go and do its thing. Again, we're not on fast anymore. We're on high-level effort reasoning. So, this is usually how I operate. Um I don't use anything under high because I'm not really ever in a hurry to ship code. I think if you're going to be using fast mode and like I said, you're going to be, you know, shipping a feature fast or fixing a bug fast, you're going to probably want to use that if it is worth it. I will have to check my usage at limits again. I am interested to see how that is looking. Hopefully, we haven't hit our limits, but yeah, so far, I guess what I think about Opus 4.8 specifically in relation to Opus 4.7, I do think it's an upgrade

23:42because I ran at the start of this video that same exact prompt using Opus 4.7. It didn't catch a lot of the things that it caught on the first go around with Opus 4.8. Again, it has that dynamic workflow feature. So, here's a few things that I had fixed in the first go around. And we are going to head and knock each one out by one by one. So, it completed phase zero. The five kill switches are now closed, which is awesome. So, the callback off, the GPS strip, the upscale free cogs, and referral faucet, also the versions IDOR. So, that's pretty cool. The two things that need for me, not code, is set the chi callback secret to any long random string in my Vercel, which is awesome.

24:29Okay. I will go ahead and do that. And then, a note on what it held back. Everything is uncommitted. Everything is just local. So, very cool. So, I can test this out locally before we ship it to production. And the remote show video, I think turned out really good. Um you saw it. That was literally just, you know, from one prompt. Obviously, it can get better, but still, that's pretty impressive. And now we're working on the landing page. I want to just see how that performs. And just see how well the design is because vibe coded websites look terrible. Okay, after it generated a redesign plan, which just took a few minutes, it says the design direction is a cinematic dark lux, a cohesive premium full dark marketing experience instead of the current light dark patchwork with drifting emerald cyan aurora glassmorphism,

25:15gradient borders, same copy. So, it's going to keep the same copy. Modern architecture. >> [clears throat] >> Cool. So, signature scroll stoppers, the hero section. I would actually if if it does a good job, I think using Google Omni to create some motion in the hero section will help greatly. That's something I can create in another video, but if it does a good job, this is just more of a test just to see what it does out the box with no skills. You could get the front end design skill, you can do the awesome design skill. There's you can use Claude design, you can use open design. There's many ways to go about it, but we're just trying to test out of the box. How does it perform? And is this an upgrade in UI? I think that is the one of the biggest struggles when it comes to LLM's designing UI, whether

26:01it's Google Stitch, whether you're using Google AI Studio, or you're using GPT 5.5. I think the best way that I've found so far is actually using GPT 5.5 or GPT images 2.0 to actually get a good foundation of design built. So, you could give it a reference image of your favorite website's design, have it create something similar, and then create that and make that come to life, whether you're using Codex or just pull that image into Claude Code to actually make the components come to life. That's what I found and helps you kind of get out of that vibe coded look. So, if you have a website right now that looks really vibe coded, you know, with the simple vibe coded icons, I mean, I don't I don't blame you. My websites were

26:46built like that to start. Um, it's really important to kind of get away from that to stand out, right? We don't want to blend in with everyone being able to five code now and mythos on deck in the next few weeks, we need to be able to stick out a little bit, right? Okay, about 10 minutes later it finished the whole redesign cinematic dark looks. Let's take a look. Let's fire up the local server and let's just take a look. NPM run dev and we will get it going. Okay, so it did a pretty good job of the redesign. I just hate gradients. Like gradients are the dead giveaway of this is a vibe coded app, but nonetheless, I don't know. Six out of 10 is kind of what I give it. It did okay. It tried. So, let's just take a look at the rest

27:32of it before we judge. Just the gradients kill me a little bit, a little bit dead inside, but I get it. Still kept my magic hand, which is awesome. Still kept the before and afters. It didn't like completely redesign it. It's similar, but the motion is good. I give it an a B for effort. This is with no skills, no nothing. Um it just looks a lot like the original. I mean, here's the original and it's Mind you, this was done with like Opus 4.1 with a lot of back and forth, and this is Opus 4.8, which I mean, it's okay. I was working on something, too. I actually went into GPT images 2.0 and created a before and after of a terrible home that looks trashed and a beautiful home that looks amazing of the same home, and I did that

28:18in Google Omni. It took the before and after. Let's see what it did here. Well, it did it. It just did it the opposite way. So, um okay, we'll reverse that, but it did okay. I mean, if you just reverse the photos, um that was supposed to be the end photo, but that's something I would want put when I I'd be hideous. Okay, so little tweaking there, but you kind of get the idea, right? So, um Um, yeah, overall thoughts, I think Opus 4.8 is an upgrade, not a significant upgrade, and I think there's some really cool features to be happy about if you're a builder. Um, with Mythos coming out potentially in the next few weeks, I wouldn't get so stuck and caught up with GPT 5.5 or Opus

29:044.8, and not be married to any of these local LLMs. I was impressed with the fast mode, but also at the same time, how much was that going to cost me again? I used 6% of my weekly usage in that 48-minute session. So, you know, not terrible versus this time a month ago people were freaking out about usage limits. I would say it's an amazing model, probably the best model I've used. GPT 5.5, the reason why I liked it so much is just it seemed faster. You know, it just seemed faster with his responses. You get so much usage on just the $100 a month plan with OpenAI versus like a $200 a month plan with Claude. So, I'm still a big Anthropic fan. I have always used Anthropic as my main,

29:50you know, coding agent and my my main agent to build apps. I use Hermes and OpenClaude, but I use my GPT 5.5 subscription within those. And I can just like be on, you know, building things out with Hermes and OpenClaude for hours and never even hit 1 or 2 or 3% usage on my OpenAI subscription. So, kind of that's my thoughts there. You know, I think use the fast mode wisely, use the dynamic workflow wisely, because it is going to use a ton of usage, but, you know, we saw the landing page redesign. I think that was okay. We saw the Remotion video on a one-shot. That was okay. Again, you know, nothing is going to be amazing right out of the box, but it allows us to innovate better and be more creative and tweak how we

30:35want it to to, you know, look at the end result. So, like I said, if you want to learn how to just set up your first AI agent or build with these tools and become an expert in building and creating apps. I have a community down below, you should check it out. And what are your thoughts on Opus 4.8? Leave it in the comments down below. I'm not like blown away, but hey, it was cool, it was fun. I do think it's an upgrade, but you know, when's the next model dropping? In 12 minutes? It's like, come on. So, I'm happy. What are your thoughts? We'll see in the next video. Have a blessed night.