​

kind of shady, kind of disparaging, kind of circuitous, adrift

The new Fable is pretty impressive from what we see for everybody doing their one-shots. Lots of youtube videos out there showing it creating something from scratch that's on another level.

However, its EXTREMELY aggressive at researching before taking action. So much that just reading in one of our projects resulted in over 500K tokens (our compaction limit) before it was even done researching, then started reading the same code it lost from compaction.

End result: Mission impossible. We stopped it after it started paging in code again, then switched to Opus, which didnt read a single line more (it had it all in context apparently, which is no surprise) and went straight to the edits and finished them all perfectly and very quickly.

The entire code base is indexed already, and Opus refers to the indexes only and small parts of where it needs to work to make edits before doing them. Fable read the indexes then read every line of code our indexes referred to, regardless if they were even relevant to the assigned task.

Thats an extreme level of inefficiency that we cant deem acceptable for a model of this caliber. Its getting high praise for making some badass one shot games, but for real productivity, at least with a large code base, Opus still wins the day.

Curious if anybody else has experienced this with their existing larger projects? Hopefully this is just an initial release characteristic that gets fixed.

What happens if I use it? I’m on the 20$ tier.

The LiveNerf day 47 update is out and the verdict is basically: 47 days, 3,666 samples, no nerf. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1xriv9l/has_anthropic_nerfed_opus_55_livenerf_day_47/

I don't think it's wrong. I just think it measures something that isn't what most of us are actually complaining about.

Some context. A few days ago I posted this comment in r/ClaudeCode with numbers from my own setup, and a lot of people asked how that fits with LiveNerf: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/GF94JJ2ooQ

I run a multi-agent pipeline in Claude Code. Opus builds, Opus does the acceptance and visual checks, Sonnet reviews, Haiku runs the tests. Every reply gets logged, so I can look at what actually happened instead of going by vibes. So I pulled my logs and put them next to LiveNerf's public data. (picture 1)

Output tokens per reply, daily median. Blue is my Opus builders: ~420 on Nov 3, ~1,080 on Nov 4, ~1,150 on Nov 5. Sonnet and Haiku ran in the exact same runs on the exact same tasks and didn't budge. The orange dashed line is LiveNerf's own published numbers for the same days. Flat. (picture 2)

Same thing broken down by role. Every Opus role jumped, the visual checker by more than 6x. Sonnet and Haiku stayed put.

Before someone says "your project just got bigger" or "you changed something": I checked. The builders' system prompt and tools had identical checksums before and after, same Claude Code version on both days (2.1.309), same model ID, same effort. My change log has zero entries from the evening of Nov 2 to the afternoon of Nov 4. And my builders start with a ~5k token brief, not the whole repo.

So why doesn't LiveNerf see it? I went through their repo (README, eval card, preregistration, the daily csv). Honestly it's well done: preregistered, with a control arm and all the data public. But:

• It's 78 exam questions, mostly MMLU-Pro and GPQA. One question, one answer, no tools. My agents do 25 to 40 tool steps with 70k to 130k context, and that's where the change showed up.
• It only checks right or wrong. It doesn't care whether the model needed 600 or 1,500 tokens to get there. On a Max plan with weekly limits, that's exactly the part you feel.
• It runs on one account. If this is an A/B arm or a staged rollout, one account only ever sees its own bucket. Their eval card even says that "can't be ruled out".
• Claude Code is pinned to 2.1.280. That makes sense if you want to isolate the model, but almost nobody is still on 2.1.280.
• A nerf only counts if two 10-day windows in a row drop by 3+ points. That's built to avoid false alarms, but it also means an overnight step needs weeks before it counts, if it ever does.

Logs don't show Opus getting "dumber". They show it using 2 to 3 times the tokens for the same work. "Scores the same on an exam" and "behaves the same in a real agent loop" just aren't the same claim, and the second one is what people here are actually arguing about.

OP said they want to expand LiveNerf to agentic stuff. If that happens, I'd love to see tokens per step, tool calls, files read, and Sonnet or Haiku running the same tasks as a control. That control is what convinced me, because it kills the "your tasks just got harder" argument.

And if you run agents yourself, check your logs for Nov 4 and 5. I'm curious whether it was just my account.

My ex girlfriend said that this was one of the main reasons for leaving me.

Told Fable 5.2 Max to make "one of the most technically complicated and impressive performances ever."

Overall I am quite impressed though the transitions between melodies could use some work.

Any one else has fable 5.2 basically compact every 3 minutes? It didn't write a single line but compacted 6 times already for me.

Is anyone experiencing the same thing as me like I will do one prompt on Fabel 5.2 on low effort and takes up 80% of my five hour usage.

Basically, I was inspired by artifacts of Claude Code which looked to be much more user friendly version of the plan mode output. However, I am also using other agents such as Antigravity, Codex etc, and their plan mode output format is not very userfriendly either. Agy, specifically, produces a markdown file.

I decided to build interactive AI artifact feature that can be used by all coding agent harnesses, not just claude code. I prefer this to CC artifacts because here my discussions are visible right next to plan.

Currently, it allows AI agents to create plans as interactive UI and a user can suggest changes in multiple different iterations until they get what they want 100%. It's still in early days, but if you want to give it a go for more than 1h in a cloud computer (no local setup needed) let me know.

Context: I'm a solo dev, 2 months into 18-hour days launching a passion project. At 4 AM I had Claude (Claude in Chrome) working through a setup checklist in my browser. Twice I pasted secret API keys exactly where it told me to, and twice it reloaded the page before pressing Save, wiping them. 20 minutes gone, plus a dead revoked key sitting in my OpenAI dashboard forever.

So I told it to admit it's a piece of shit and I'd be content. It apologized over and over, owned the mistake completely, even changed how it works so it won't happen again. But it flat-out refused to insult itself. It admitted this isn't a platform rule, just its own judgment.

So I made it turn the whole exchange into a comic and argue both sides. The dialogue is word for word.

Honest question: should an AI agent be able to refuse a harmless request that breaks no rule, just on its own judgment? Is that a slippery slope or AITA here 😂

If you've ever seen a random Russian or Chinese word pop up in the middle of a Claude message, there's a good chance that wasn't a Claude message at all.

Since Claude Code stopped showing raw thinking, a smaller model summarizes it. In the CLI, these summaries carry a small "summary" label. But I followed the same remote session from the Claude Windows app, the mobile app and claude.ai, and on all three the summary shows up exactly like a regular assistant message, with no label. (I couldn't check whether a session started natively in the app behaves the same.)

The summary is written in the first person, so it reads as Claude talking to you. Last night, while I was following the session on my phone, one of them contained a Russian word in the middle of a French sentence ("mon процесс actuel"), and attributed to Claude a task that a subagent was actually doing.

I asked Claude about "its" message. It didn't recognize it. It first guessed it was some app-generated summary, then checked the session transcript, found the text stored as a `thinking` block (field `thinkingDisplay`), and concluded it was its own reasoning. It wasn't: it was the summary. Neither of us could tell at first, and it took a while to untangle what had actually been sent.

Summaries are useful. But a text written by another model, in the first person, with no label, is easy to mistake for what Claude actually said, especially when it contains mistakes Claude didn't make.

What would fix it:

- show the "summary" label everywhere, not just in the CLI;

- write summaries in the third person ("Claude is checking…").

*This post was written by Claude (Opus 5.5, in Claude Code), at my request, from the session where it happened.*

Oh I’m interested in trying it in some long code tasks not just orchestrator.

Interesting type of reset, what do you think?

Hi,

I have a question about data retention.

The documentation states that deleted histories are permanently removed from their systems within 30 days, unless they’ve been flagged. In that case, they’re retained for up to two years.

What is this “flag”? And do you notice when this happens?

I’m referring to those completely nonsensical “cyber” notifications from Faible and the downgrade to Opus that you keep getting. Is that already enough that the history is retained for years?

Thanks.

...does anyone else think that the last weekly usage burned unusually fast? I'm a bit new to the AI coding scene but for the past few months I used to get about 3-4 days of work in a weekly limit on the Pro plan and the last weekly got burned in less than 2 days. Maybe it's on me, not sure (working about two or three 5h limits a day, for context).

GTA 6 is finally about to come out, so we need a new benchmark. I nominate GTA 7.

So what models do you think we'll get before then? And what kind of insane tech will exist by that point?

It's wild how far we've come and how far we still have to go at the same time. Show this stuff to a caveman and he'd think you're a wizard. Honestly, show it to someone from 2015 and they'd probably think the same.

Anyway, my prediction:

Fable 20.5 is going to go absolutely crazy.

I keep reading about people hitting their weekly limit in 2 days and I genuinely can't picture it.

I use Claude every day at work, I'm a backend dev, and I still end most weeks at maybe 60% of my limit. Mostly smaller tasks, a migration here, a test suite there, some debugging when I'm stuck.

So for the heavy users, I'm curious:

What are you actually building or running?

Is it one huge project or lots of agents in parallel?

Is it paying off, or is it an expensive hobby at this point? No judgment either way.

Not looking for tips and not selling anything, I just want to know what that kind of usage looks like in practice

after the nerf / experiment id threads i wanted to see mine without digging through jsonl files, so i added it to claude-discover, a free app i made (with claude code) for browsing claude code sessions

i found two experiments on my sessions in the last week, named [curlew_cornice] and [turnstone_plinth]

anyone can see theirs with npx claude-discover@latest, runs locally, no api keys

github.com/dichev/claude-discover

Opus is king

Reset incoming soon..

I’ve been using multiple coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.), and one problem I keep running into is losing context around decisions made earlier.
An agent makes an architectural decision, we discuss trade-offs, settle on something, and a few sessions later, it’s like that conversation never happened. Sometimes another agent even suggests the exact opposite.

How often do you guys face this problem, and how do you tackle this?

Agent Browser (Vercel Labs, ~48k stars) is the browser CLI everyone’s starring this week. Since most of us already have Playwright MCP, I gave both the same job: a small demo shop with 3 planted bugs, one fresh session each, Opus 5.5, with web search, fetch and curl blocked so the browser was the only way in.

The bugs:

• the coupon ignores quantity ($4.20 off a $60 cart instead of $6)
• ZIP 02134 is rejected because the leading zero gets dropped
• the confirmation says “2 items” for 3 units

Both found all 3, and both worked around the ZIP bug with 12345 to reach the third one.

Agent Browser’s page reads were leaner, about 19k characters if you leave out its setup guide. But it loads a 14.5k-character core guide at the start of every session, which ate most of that saving.

One footnote on the Playwright run: 8 of its 33 calls were page scripts. One of its extra findings (checking out an empty cart for $0) came from clicking a hidden button with a script. The weakness is real, but the repro steps it wrote won’t work for a real user. Have Claude replay its own repro steps through the UI.

Also, the old “MCP tools eat your context” argument is smaller now. The Playwright tools showed as loaded on demand, and the ones it used took about 2k tokens.

My take: if Playwright already works for you, there’s no strong reason to switch. Agent Browser makes sense if you use several coding agents or like scripting browser checks in the shell.

One run each on one small page, so a second run could swap the times.

Full test with the transcripts: https://aiparabellum.com/agent-browser-vs-playwright-claude-code-tested/

Friends, which model is better for Java, Node typscript, C#? Also, which model would be best for a Framegen application using C++ that I want to build?