What Opus 4.7 Thinks It's Doing: Top Patterns It Claims to Use

For every Opus 4.7 repo we’ve deeply analyzed, a second-stage LLM pass extracts a structured summary:

{
  "purpose": "...",
  "primary_domain": "...",
  "key_patterns": ["..."],
  "reuse_potential": "...",
  "notable_risks": ["..."]
}

The key_patterns field is interesting. It’s effectively the model’s self-reported vocabulary for what the repo does at an architectural level. Collect those across 683 summarized repos and you get Opus 4.7’s vocabulary:

Top 30 patterns (self-reported)

What this tells us

1. Auth is the dominant pattern

JWT authentication (85) + JWT-based authentication (16) + Authentication & authorization (13) + JWT or session-based auth (9) = 123 mentions of auth patterns. That’s a frank signal — auth is what Opus 4.7 thinks about more than anything else when it writes a backend.

This matches with earlier data showing @/lib/supabase/server in thousands of imports and 577 Supabase users. Auth isn’t theoretical — it’s operationally central.

2. REST is the only API style mentioned

RESTful API endpoints (68) + RESTful API design (65) + RESTful API (55) + REST API (10) + REST endpoints (9) = 207 REST mentions.

GraphQL: doesn’t appear in the top 30.
gRPC: doesn’t appear.
WebSockets: doesn’t appear.
tRPC: doesn’t appear.

Opus 4.7 builds REST APIs. It’s not even close.

3. MVC lives

MVC architecture gets 55 mentions. Despite the “MVC is dead” narrative of recent years, it’s the single most-mentioned architectural pattern after REST. Opus 4.7 thinks in MVC terms and labels its code that way.

4. ORM is ubiquitous

ORM-based database access (24) + ORM for database access (15) + Database ORM usage (12) + Database ORM (12) = 63 ORM mentions.

Direct SQL appears in only a handful of descriptions. The default mode is “use an ORM” — Prisma or Drizzle for TypeScript, SQLAlchemy for Python.

5. Docker is the deployment default

Dockerized deployment (45) + Docker containerization (30) + CI/CD pipeline (22) + GitHub Pages deployment (23) = 120 deployment pattern mentions.

Opus 4.7 assumes its code will be containerized. It writes Dockerfiles (867 repos have one) and docker-compose.yml (495 repos) as a matter of course.

6. “Responsive design” is explicit

80 mentions of “responsive design” is more than “React” (18). Opus 4.7 knows it’s writing mobile-friendly UIs and calls that out as a pattern — even though it’s just using Tailwind’s responsive utility classes.

Patterns that are absent

Not seeing a pattern in the top 30 is sometimes as informative as seeing it:

• Event sourcing — zero
• CQRS — zero
• DDD (domain-driven design) — zero
• Microservices — zero (even though 12% of repos are “massive” — they’re monoliths)
• Caching strategies — barely mentioned
• Rate limiting — barely mentioned
• Observability — barely mentioned

This gives us a very specific picture: Opus 4.7 defaults to simple, REST-oriented, JWT-authenticated, Dockerized monoliths with ORM access and responsive UIs. The fancier enterprise patterns don’t feature in its self-narrative at all.

What this means for meta-prompting

If you want to bend Opus 4.7 away from these defaults, you need to explicitly name the alternative. “Use event sourcing” or “don’t use an ORM; write SQL directly” or “build this as microservices” — without explicit override, you get the default 30-pattern vocabulary.

On the flip side, if the prompt says “build me a SaaS,” you’ll get the default stack for free. That’s the training-data center-of-mass talking.

See more: The CLAUDE.md Phenomenon · Why 72% of Opus 4.7 Code Is “Highly Reusable”.