It is good enough to be useful for programming. It can do clearly defined tasks like find the root cause of a bug. Using it for writing code is frustrating because it is slow and produces lots of tokens. Meanwhile Opus 5.5 is good enough that you can pretty much rely on it doing exactly what you say (and not what you meant), faster, more context efficient and you get a ton of usage with the cheapest subscription.

I can see this changing, though. If the open-weight models reach the level of Claude 5.5 and Anthropic stops subsidizing they might be on pretty equal footing. I don't see how further improving the model would help, except maybe if somebody invents a different way to manage context that remembers all the important details over a long time so it actually "learns".

I don't think they're insinuating running inferences from the SSD. But you need somewhere to store the weights for the GPU to load.