Opus 4.8 and the era of tasks that don't fall over

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 on May 28 — and the headline for business users isn't a benchmark, it's reliability on long tasks. Earlier models did great 10-minute work; 4.8 is tuned for the two-hour kind: big migrations, deep research passes, multi-file projects.

What to delegate now that you maybe didn't before:

• "Go through all 400 product descriptions and rewrite them in our new tone" — one task, not 400 copy-pastes.
• "Reconcile these two exports and list every mismatch with its likely cause."
• "Audit our website for outdated prices, dead links and old dates."

The trick with long tasks: ask for a plan first, approve it, then let it run. You review twice (plan, result) instead of babysitting the middle.