When I say total market capture I mean in the March time frame. At that point Claude code / 4.6 was so far beyond any competition even meta abandoned their entire internal coding harness and fine tuning efforts in favor of large scale Claude code adoption. Codex was far behind, Gemini was a non entity, Chinese models hadn’t had their moment (and frankly aren’t practical to this day for enterprise work due to PRC concerns). The world was cursor, aider, and a few others with an unclear superior model. 4-6 was strikingly better - if could develop autonomously from a spec to done with generally high quality and didn’t require turn by turn guidance. In my 35 years I’ve never seen such a rapid pivot across so many companies and individuals.

Since then Anthropic has done little to capitalize on the good will and a lot to squander it. sol, r4, kimi, even metas avacado has come a long way and in many, if not most, cases surpassed opus-5. Concurrently opus has declined in utility to the point of near uselessness, fable roll out didn’t seem to understand market dynamics, and their competitors are watching their consistent missteps closely. The fall has been breathtakingly fast - from March to July they imploded in a half dozen or more missteps, devolved their product quality, and failed to effectively respond to competitors. Their product focus seems to lack exactly that - focus.