Great beginner use cases for Opus 4.6 are tasks where you can verify results easily and where the model’s long-context strength helps without requiring complex tooling. Examples include summarizing long documents, extracting structured data from policies or tickets, rewriting technical text for different audiences, and generating code scaffolding with accompanying explanations. These are approachable because you can compare the output to the input and quickly spot mistakes.
Another beginner-friendly area is “analysis + checklists.” You can paste a long spec and ask Opus 4.6 to produce acceptance criteria, edge cases, and a test plan. Or paste incident notes and ask for a timeline, suspected root causes, and next-step hypotheses. The key is to request outputs you can validate: lists, tables, JSON, or step-by-step plans rather than free-form essays.
If your beginner use case is Q&A over docs, start with retrieval from day one. Index your docs into Milvus or managed Zilliz Cloud and have Opus 4.6 answer only using retrieved chunks. Beginners often try to paste entire docs into prompts; retrieval is usually cheaper, faster, and more accurate, and it scales as your content grows.