Tasting Notes: Claude Opus 4.5

Tasting Notes: Where the FLORA team reviews the latest text, image, and video models

What Opus 4.5 Reveals Beneath the Workflow Map

Ancient sailors often described the ocean past the known routes as a place where familiar rules lost their reliability. Winds shifted without known patterns and currents contradicted experience. That boundary, where navigation stopped being procedural and started becoming interpretive, was where the true skill of the sailor revealed itself.

Most AI models don’t operate this way. They solve tasks in isolation: a prompt enters, an answer exits, and the machinery inside remains compartmentalized and forgetful. Anthropic’s latest reasoning model, Claude Opus 4.5, marks a different kind of convergence—the same way a seasoned navigator senses coherence emerging from conditions that once seemed unpredictable.

Much has been said about Opus 4.5's achievements in coding. But the deeper breakthrough lies in the nature of intelligence displayed, not the domain. We’ve found that the same capacities that make it capable of constructing complex software architectures enable it to reason across visual workflows, especially in environments where creativity, analysis, and decision-making are critical.

Where we've seen it shine

We've been running Opus 4.5 through its paces internally, and a few patterns keep emerging.

Asset synthesis and mood boarding.

Feed Opus 4.5 a scattered collection of reference images—screenshots, textures, photography, half-finished concepts—and it pulls coherent threads from the chaos. It describes not just what it sees, but the relationships between pieces: why certain images feel cohesive, what compositional logic connects them, how color temperature shifts across the set. The output isn't a list of tags. It's the kind of synthesis a creative director does when building a mood board—identifying the throughline that makes a pile of references feel like a direction.

Feeding in reference images to build a moodboard

Understanding what makes visuals work.

This is where it gets interesting. Drop in an image you're trying to recreate the feel of—an ad campaign you admire, a film still with a particular quality—and Opus 4.5 can articulate what makes it effective. Not surface descriptors, but the structural reasoning: how the composition draws the eye, why the color grading creates a specific emotional register, what the negative space is doing. It reverse-engineers intent from execution.

Feeding analysis into generation.

Once you have that articulation, you can pipe it directly into models like Nano Banana Pro or Seedream 4.5. The results map remarkably close to the original intent—not copies, but outputs that inherit the logic of what you were trying to achieve. The analysis becomes the prompt scaffold that closes the gap between reference and result.

Using visual understanding to create compelling narratives

Workflows, particularly in creative platforms, have long been treated as static diagrams—arrows, blocks, stages. But a workflow is fundamentally a logic engine: a lattice of dependencies, assumptions, parallel branches, and emergent patterns. Instead of generating isolated answers, Opus 4.5 evaluates the architecture of the pipeline itself: which steps belong, which are redundant, which require deeper cognitive effort, and which should be re-ordered for clarity.

Workflows that once behaved like predictable routes now reveal deeper currents—and Opus 4.5 moves through them with the steadiness of a navigator who can read more than the surface of the water.

Try our workflow that shows how you can get the most out of Opus 4.5: https://app.florafauna.ai/join-project/4492737e-874b-45bc-b14c-dbfd2e8628c4