This may be the most important Claude skill I would recommend learning if you use it for real work:
Learn how to leave a model.
You spend weeks working with one model. It learns your writing style, your project, your instructions, the mistakes you hate, the files you use, the prompts that work and the way you like things done.
Then Anthropic releases a better model.
Six days ago, Opus 5.5 arrived. It costs about 40% less to run than Opus 5 on typical token-billed work. Today, Sonnet 5.5 arrived. Anthropic says it runs more than 30% faster than Sonnet 5 and can cost up to 30% less per task. On Terminal-Bench 4.0, an agentic coding test, Sonnet 5.5 scored 70.6%. Opus 5.5 scored 66.4%.
You obviously want the new model.
But then you remember how much work went into making the old Claude actually useful for your work.
That is where people get stuck.
And with models improving this quickly, I do not think we can afford to spend another month settling into Claude every time Anthropic adds .5
to the name.
So here is the system I would learn now.
Your new Claude is not actually starting from zero
There is one thing worth clearing up first.
Claude Opus 5 itself did not secretly store everything about you inside the model.
A lot of what makes Claude feel personal lives outside the model.
Your Memory stores useful things Claude has learned about you. Your Projects can hold their own files, instructions, chats and memory. Skills store repeatable ways of doing work. Claude Code can use CLAUDE.md
and its own memory. Your API workflows have system prompts, tool descriptions and other instructions in your code.
That is very good news.
If you move from Opus 5 to Opus 5.5 inside the same Claude setup, you do not need to teach Claude your entire life again.
The real job is much smaller:
Find what your old setup depends on, clean it up, carry it forward, and make sure the new model still does the work correctly.
That is what we are going to do below
First, let the old Claude prepare the new Claude
Do this before changing anything.
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