Elyra 0.9.24: Opus 5 Lands — and a Bug That Taught Us About Silence

Two stories in this release. One is the headline everyone expected this week: Claude Opus 5 is out, and it's in Elyra the same day. The other is small, almost embarrassing, and possibly the more useful lesson: a paste shortcut that failed without saying a word.

1. Claude Opus 5, same-day

The rumors had been circulating for a week. We checked the API three times — polite 404s every time. Then this morning the Models API answered differently:

claude-opus-5
claude-sonnet-5
claude-fable-5
claude-opus-4-8
...

A probe returned 200. Opus 5 is real, and as of 0.9.24 it's in Elyra's model registry:

/model opus-5

Where it sits in the family — and this lineup is worth a moment, because Anthropic's top shelf is now genuinely interesting:

Sonnet 5 Opus 5 Fable 5 Price $3/$15 (intro $2/$10) $5/$25 $10/$50 Context 1M 1M 1M Thinking Adaptive Adaptive Adaptive, always on Knowledge cutoff Jan 2026 May 2026 Jan 2026

Notice the odd one out: Opus 5 has the freshest knowledge of the three — four months newer than Fable 5, at half Fable's price. Anthropic's own docs now name it the recommended starting point for complex agentic coding. If your work involves recent frameworks, recent APIs, recent anything, that May cutoff is quietly a big deal.

Our default stays Sonnet 5. Deliberately. It's half the price (and intro-priced at $2/$10 through August), and the whole philosophy of Elyra's model handling — the one Chapter 13 of the course preaches — is that the expensive model should be an active choice, not a passive default. Put Opus 5 in your /models lineup, reach for it with Ctrl+P when the task deserves it. We've set a calendar note for September 1st, when Sonnet's intro pricing ends and the math changes; the default decision gets revisited then, in the open, like this one.

The provider-agnostic point, one more time, because weeks like this keep proving it: Fable 5 went GA, Fugu Ultra slipped through the gateways, and now Opus 5 — three frontier arrivals in one month, and every one of them was a registry refresh away. No integration sprints. No waiting for a vendor's agent to catch up. /model, and you're there.

2. The paste bug: a lesson in failing loudly

A user report came in: "Ctrl+V (paste image) stopped working in the latest version."

The debugging trail was short but instructive. Image paste on macOS goes through a small native module, @elyracode/clipboard. It's an optional dependency — and npm has a behavior worth knowing about: if an optional dependency fails to install (say, because an update ran while freshly published packages were still propagating through the registry), npm skips it silently. No error. No warning. The install "succeeds."

So the user's machine had a working Elyra with a hole where the clipboard module should be:

npm ls -g @elyracode/clipboard
└── (empty)

And our code compounded the silence: the module loader caught the require failure and quietly set clipboard = null. Ctrl+V became a no-op. No error for npm's part, no error for ours — a feature removed by two systems politely saying nothing.

The immediate fix was a reinstall. The real fix, shipped in 0.9.24, is about the second silence — the one we owned. The loader now remembers why the module is missing, and pressing Ctrl+V tells you:

Image paste is unavailable: the optional @elyracode/clipboard module is
not installed. Reinstall to fix it: npm install -g @elyracode/coding-agent

Platform-aware, too: the warning only appears where the native module is actually the paste path (macOS, Windows, Linux/X11) — Wayland users go through wl-paste and never see it. And an empty clipboard is still just quiet, as it should be.

The principle, which we'd apply anywhere in Elyra: a feature that can't work must say so. Silent degradation is the most expensive kind of bug — it doesn't cost you when it breaks, it costs you every day until you happen to notice.

Get it

npm install -g @elyracode/coding-agent@latest

Then give the newcomer something worthy:

/model opus-5
> Review SPEC.md against what we actually built. What drifted?