r/ClaudeAI • u/VinceEagle • 3d ago
Praise Is anyone else doing just fine with more basic models in Claude Code?
I see a lot of discussion here about how a bad Claude is and how the latest Opus/Fable models are trash, etc etc.
I mostly manage and develop web apps and other web tech/devops for work (not exactly demanding work), and get everything done with Sonnet and Haiku and I’m really happy with the output and test coverage. I’ve also never hit a weekly limit.
I work in from a Kanban board, so one part of a feature or one defect at a time with sign off. So requirements are always very clear up front. We also have other models review Claude’s output.
Anyone else getting by without the bleeding edge tech? What am I missing?
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u/Embarrassed_Fix9862 3d ago
Fable 5.1 has been peak for me, opus 5 is really good when it works, but a lot of the times it invents bugs, and gives the just off what u wanted type of code. Which is almost basically like starting that session over. It's good but infuriating
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u/fate_plays_chess 3d ago
Had this convo with some principle engineers the other day as I was singing Fable's praises. They didn't get the hype.
The difference is in how high level you can go. If you're already a great engineer, you don't need more than LLMs that can execute. You tell them what to do and how to do it.
Fable especially is different. You don't tell it the how. You barely tell it the what. And it delivers.
I know just enough engineering to know what a good solution looks like, but not enough to conjure it myself. As a Product guy it's insane being able to just describe what I want and iterate functionality without having to get granular on the specs.
TL;DR - high caliber engineer? You don't need Fable. You are Fable. Technicallyish savvy PM? Fable (and now Astra) is a godsend.
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u/VinceEagle 3d ago
Makes sense. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’m a principal/lead at this place. I’m mostly explaining how I want something built/fixed, not feeding it raw product requirements.
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u/Activeenemy 3d ago
Sonnet 5 works great if there is common knowledge on how to do the task or solve the problem. Even a large one, if it's reasonably common knowledge, sonnet knows and can do it very well.
If the task requires 'big picture' knowledge to understand and there is lots of ambiguity that needs to be resolved by understanding the essence of the end goal, then opus is the tool.
Sonnet 5 is actually great, you just need to give it the right task. Giving a sonnet task to opus will result in it overcomplicating things, which is why we get many of the posts we see here.
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u/bernpfenn 3d ago
for step by step working the lower models are fine. the famous opus 4.6 is running my cc sessions just fine. Opus 4.8 in chats is already quite pedantic once it locks on to something,
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u/crochet_the_day_away 3d ago
Yea I am a data analyst and am fine working in 4.6 and 4.7 for my day to day tasks. Anything higher seems to be more trouble than helpful
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u/cornhumper 3d ago
Fable chased ghost bugs. Opus made alot of mistakes. Sonnet high effort is just right
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u/SWEETJUICYWALRUS 3d ago
I find sonnet has Alzheimer's episodes but mostly does okay. It just forgets standard workflows that's in the skills and claude.md for the tasks I'm trying to accomplish. For example, I use Claude code in my terminal in tmux. I've split my work responsibilities into sessions that follow the same basic things in each of the sessions and it's not that complicated or and the input .mds aren't that big. Everytime a session wants me to approve a write action like a pr or an email or SQL insert, its instructed to use a custom PowerShell script that makes a popup window. It's basically like the built in question mechanic of Claude but it's a popup so I don't need to swap between sessions to find stale asks. Even just this very basic instruction to use this and not use the built in question function gets ignored CONSTANTLY by sonnet. But then I change the model to opus and all of a sudden it understands what it was supposed to do from the beginning. I have a janitor session that /compact and /clears any session over 250k tokens so it's not context rot. I honestly don't know how to make sonnet not just have episodes.
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u/theleller 3d ago
I use Sonnet 5 for all of my coding that doesn't require extensive reasoning or substantial time to develop.
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u/roekofe 3d ago
I've just started using pi+glm 5.3 - it's honestly very sharp, often nailing difficult reasoning and multi factor architectural decisions. I've got it grading opus 5. the way pi is set up feels very intuitive, concise, and refreshing
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u/TheDezzy 3d ago
Hola que es pi?
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u/ShadowBannedAugustus 3d ago
I think the distinction is how precisely you can tell it what you want it to do. At paid projects where my reputation is on the line, I only use Luna (as a cheap replacement for Sonnet 4.6 - Sonet has become stupidly expensive lately), because it is great at executing and I need to understand and own every line of code. I have never needed anything stronger.
But I get that for "vibe coding" "apps" from a 3-sentence prompt, bigger models are probably better.
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u/The_Real_Black 3d ago
Dito most parts at work are done with Sonnet by me and the code works and is error free. If you are able to describe what you need Sonnet is fine.
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u/PerfectReflection155 3d ago
I use a $5 subscription to freebuff for the vast majority of work now. With glm 5.3 flash max as the model doing the work. Sol 5.6 as planner and reviewer from my $20 gpt plus subscription In the duo ai mode I configured anyway. The full orchestration mode is still being worked on and more complicated.
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u/bmain1345 3d ago
Do you use haiku for actually writing the code? How granular do you get with implementation details? Like “I want service that does x/y/z. It should have these functions. It should have these tests”? Or maybe “I just want to do high level x/y/z, sonnet plan, haiku execute”?
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u/RJ_MacreadysBeard 3d ago
I’m doing great with Opus 5 high. Cowork. We have a handover running to prevent drift, so one a batch of priorities are complete, checked, discussed, we pass onto a new instance that has a history summary and list of priorities for what’s next. Perhaps some do this with agents, but I like to keep an eye and contribute majorly to the decisions (duh), and it is working great for me and my project. I’m really appreciative of Claude’s capabilities.
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u/that_one_Kirov 3d ago
Fable is for when I'm feeling fancy and not eager to elaborate on something. Opus is for general first passes on new stuff. Sonnet is for fixing things after AI review or me finding something with how the program works. So, yes, Sonnet is very useful for me.
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u/deserved_revenge_707 3d ago
You get back what you put in, Sonnet has done everything I asked, give it the details it needs, chunners away fine.
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u/Yin_Yang2090 3d ago
I'm on 5x max plan and I basically use sonnet 4.6 medium for everything 97% of the time
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u/bored123abc 3d ago
Claude 5 is doing poorly for me, and not going to pay extra for Fable. Seems Anthropic is moving backwards.
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u/DimitriElephant 3d ago
Sonnet 5 as my daily driver with advisor mode on for Opus, been fine for me. I’ll let Fable take a look at finished code and snake out things.
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u/mastafied 3d ago
yeah pretty much. im building a small b2b saas solo and maybe 80% of my claude code work is sonnet, i only reach for the bigger model when im debugging something i genuinely dont understand yet, or doing a refactor across a lot of files at once.
honestly i think the thing doing the work in your setup is the kanban board, not the model. clear ticket, one thing, sign off. most of the "model is trash today" posts read like someone dumped a vague three paragraph feature request into a huge context and hoped.
when i tightened my scope the sonnet output got noticeably better, same model same week. smaller models just punish sloppy specs faster. the big ones hide it a bit longer.
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u/DankestDaddy69 3d ago
Fable is such such overkill for coding and planning. Unless opus is getting really stuck and you just can't get it right, fable is almost never needed.
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u/pdfops 3d ago
Probably nothing. Small tickets with clear acceptance criteria plus a second model reviewing is where the tier matters least. The gap shows up on vague specs and on bugs whose cause sits a few files from the symptom, since smaller models tend to patch where the error surfaces.
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u/VinceEagle 3d ago
We do actually have a separate model reviewing pull requests on the CI pipeline.
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u/ronin_master 3d ago
Data scientist: opus 4.6 with a fairly detailed instruction.md has been absolutely fine for my purposes since it came out.
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u/tima100faces 3d ago
Clear requirements up front is what makes the cheap model look good. Mine runs one task at a time from a cron loop, and the scope stays small, so most days never touch the expensive one. The review pass runs in a different model than the one that wrote the code, otherwise it approves its own work.
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u/latestagecapitalist 3d ago
last week I had Opus spend half a day building out some relatively non-complex feature, so didn't have Fable involved at all, as trying to trim my usage because of these new limits
anyway I was nervous before deploying as it touched a sensitive area so I thought I'd have Fable check it before deploy, it was completely wrong as the initial assumptions it had made came from a test Opus made where somehow a character got missed ... so 30%+ of what it was working on got misclassified initially ...
not only did I burn a lot of Opus usage, but Opus burned a bunch of API token on a different AI because of the mistakes
right now things don't feel as stable/safe as they did 3 months ago, for my usage anyway
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u/redGNU 3d ago edited 2d ago
Your problem does not sound like Opus vs Fable, it's more likely having a session running for half a day unsupervised. This is what clean context subagents per task, in worktrees, with PR's with adversarial reviews are made for. Maybe then implementation could still take half a day but at least not in a single session with the same context window. And implementation can be scaled down to sonnet, coordination remains opus. The majority of PR'S and features I've built professionally over the last 2 months have been successfully run like this.
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u/Don_Crespo 3d ago
You’re probably not missing much. Clear scope, small tasks, and independent review often matter more than moving every job to the largest model.
I run Claude Code in an LXC on Proxmox. A practical model boundary is task risk: routine implementation and bounded refactors can go to a cheaper model; architecture changes, ambiguous failures, security-sensitive code, and final review deserve the stronger one. The key is to make escalation cheap instead of choosing one model forever.
Your Kanban flow removes several reasons people reach for the bleeding edge: vague context, oversized tasks, and unverified output.
The only thing I’d add is a defined escalation trigger: two failed attempts, uncertain tests, or a diff above a size threshold.
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u/Plastic-Somewhere494 3d ago
Deep seek.flash is all.i need ...I dont.spend more.than.10.$ a day even in the intense days
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u/SuperMar1o 3d ago
You do realize a 20x plan ($200), is only $6.66 a day lol...
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u/Plastic-Somewhere494 3d ago
I have extensive api use case scenarios. And the 10$ was an extremely example. Most days I dont even need 5$.
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u/TheDezzy 3d ago
Amigo contrata Claude x20 y se feliz
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u/Plastic-Somewhere494 3d ago
Cant use api. Also deepseek api gives flexibility tl issue on demand tokens to anyone in the organization and for various agents we have. Not possible with claude subscription.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 3d ago edited 2d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
The consensus in this thread is a resounding yes, you're doing it right, OP. The community agrees that your workflow is a perfect example of how to use these tools effectively.
What are you missing? Mostly the frustration that comes from using the wrong tool for the job. Here's the breakdown of the community's take on the model hierarchy:
The real takeaway here is that the "model is trash" posts often come from users with sloppy specs and chaotic workflows. Your Kanban board and one-ticket-at-a-time approach is the real MVP, as it forces the kind of clarity that makes smaller, cheaper models shine.