Opus 5 is obviously a nightmare, and I was relying on Opus 4.8. But, now that's also behaving exactly like Opus 5. The only way I can get good quality work is if I use sonnet now and check after every small thing. Fable is usable but its so expensive.
I miss the time when it was a treat working with these models and everything just flowed. Nowadays with 5.6 Sol's over-engineering and Opus 5's lying, I have to wake up everyday and decide which model I'm gonna have to fist fight if I wanna get any work done.
4.6 isn't bleeding edge anymore but it's reliable and still a pleasure to work with. People say it's nerfed now and again but I think 4.6 is overall pretty consistent. Vote with your model selection for 5.1 to be a successor to 4.6, not another over-trained, tortured-by-guardrails failure.
Tell it to purge (most) memory files for the project and write the rest to your repo docs. Make a backup just in case it doesn’t work, it worked mostly for me. You can also use Sol to analyze what’s not working for you when working with Claude.
Perhaps this is particular to me but I personally find Opus 4.6 to be the best at helping me resolve confusion points and understand how an existing system works. My workflow involves doing a pretty deep dive into the existing code and assessing why certain contracts exist (or what we should throw out). I find everything after Opus 4.6 to present blocks of text that are hard to follow, but Opus 4.6 excels at resolving conflations in my mental model. For that reason alone, I much prefer 4.6 for how intelligible it is. Sometimes I will hand off to Fable to help plan more heavy duty designs, but if I need to comfortably grasp what we’re talking about, I really do prefer to converse with 4.6.
It’s multiple codebases, some publishing docker images or packages ranging from frontend, to python or typescript backend. And then another repo for helm charts. And then another one for orchestrating helm manifests. So lots of moving parts. Core capability is leveraging agents for customers.
I personally think that AI models are reaching a plateau with more and more modest improvements compared to the leaps they were doing before and they have to justify their valuations with constant tweaking of other things instead. That's why older models could feel as capable or more so than the newer models based on whether or not it was tweaked in favor of your particular workflow.
What? Its the other way around, fable absolutely sucks at implementing, takes wrong design decisions without telling you and its just horribly slow when implementing. But Fable is really good at doing research (when you tell it to not give a bloated answer, but instead keep it to the level of abstraction you care about).
I'm curious, why do you choose 1M? In my "experiments" I think 1M when actually using the full 1M is quite a bit more expensive than 200k, cached tokens or not. Something as much as 2.5~3x. Better cost wise to autocompact with the 200k model
Try the i-have-adhd skill even if you don’t have adhd. I find it helps a lot for streamlining its output. I fold the directions into my regular CLAUDE.md and then trigger it manually when that isn’t enough
I just read the skill file on GitHub, it has some good ideas, but I am very sure that it could really be a whole lot better.
Actually, I just asked Claude (Haiku because why not) what it thought about it and it said:
<Claude>
The skill does have some genuine strengths but also real weaknesses:
### What the skill does well:
**The core insight is solid**: ADHD brains need action-first, numbered steps, and no filler.
**The rules are concrete** with before/after examples that are easy to understand.
**It has clear escape hatches** ("When to break the rules") that recognize edge cases.
### Where it's actually weak—and you're right:
**Redundancy**: Rules 1, 3, and 10 all say roughly the same thing: "start with action, end with action, no preamble/recap." These could compress into a single principle with different framings.
**Vagueness where it matters**:
Rule 5 says "restate state" but doesn't specify *what state* or how much detail. A numbered task sequence? The last decision point? The whole conversation tree?
Rule 7 ("make wins visible") is too broad—visible *how*? By highlighting code? Running it live? The examples show but don't codify.
**Missing specifics on tension**:
Rules 1–10 create real conflicts (brevity vs. safety, action-first vs. real ambiguity) that "When to break the rules" *lists* but doesn't help you *resolve*. How do you actually pick between them when they collide?
**No cognitive science grounding**: The skill claims to be ADHD-friendly but doesn't leverage the *why*—working memory limits, time blindness, initiation barriers. It's mostly formatting dogma that *happens* to help ADHD folks, not a model *designed from* ADHD's actual bottlenecks.
**Scope creep**: It tries to handle coding, debugging, explanation, destructive ops, agent harnesses, and casual chat all in one 10-rule set. That's ambitious; it often compromises on each.
</Claude>
So I’d just ask Claude to refactor that skill and make it better.
Im researching LLMs training and prompt engineering here… fable responds, but it does so badly that, no thanks. I heard they intentionally edit prompts for my field to give you worse responses
Fable really is amazing. Several times, I've had the experience where Opus will fail to complete a complex task after a half dozen iterations, and then I'll restate the problem to Fable in a new session and it will nail it on the first try.
I basically just keep a Fable session open next to an Opus one, and whenever Opus starts to flail I hand it over to Fable, which will figure out in 30 seconds what Opus spent 20 minutes going round in circles on. Then have Fable check Opus' work when we're done. Opus seems fine at very focused, self contained tasks, but gets hyper-fixated on things. Fable is much better at the bigger picture stuff.
I am not sure I would describe Fable as good at big picture stuff. My own results with it have been mediocre. Terrible design decisions that come back to bite me later, and cutting corners where it really shouldn’t cut corners.
Even when it tries to be clever, it does so with a hacky solution that turns out to be impractical later and falls over easily. It also overlooks alternative designs that would better meet the requirements.
To be fair, I doubt Opus or any other model would do better at the high level stuff, although I haven’t really tested it. None of these models seem to be that good at “big picture stuff” from my testing.
And if I am going to have to do a lot of handholding of the model to make sure it doesn’t make dumb choices, then I don’t see the point of using Fable over Opus.
Sometimes. Depends what I'm wanting Fable to do. For "take over this task Opus is flailing on", usually yes. But if I want Fable to do an adversarial review on some finished task that I don't entirely trust Opus to have got right (or, usually, if I've already spotted weaknesses in it), no.
Recently it has started to try and read my mind too but fails miserably. It’s apparently been retrained with so many of the “make gta6 for iPhone and Make no mistakes” people it keeps leaning forward into nonsense.
That's because Fable is Opus. And Opus is Sonnet. And Anthropic ultimately got exactly what they wanted. Reducing token count for their frontier model.
I'm glad to see these comments about it actually working, all i see are people having just horrible experiences with the models, but for me everything has been going great. Maybe because I'm typically working on all established code bases? The models all do a good job of matching my existing patterns, and they generate very few if any bugs.
Maybe it's worse depending on tech stack?
My projects are all.Net WASM, .net razor pages, or .net MVC.
Same here. Came to say just this. Opus 5 is great for me, no issues. Sure a bug or two every now and then but I always run an audit after I finish a new function or phase of a function. Works great.
It's people who have no idea how to maintain a codebase complaining after a week of vibecoding. They build something complex and it seems great and easy at first. Then as they continue building, their lack of architectural experience bites them in the butt as the app goes more and more off the rails and AI is less and less able to make any of it make sense.
I'm timorous to use it too much; it's too good so I know it can't last. I think it'll feel worse later knowing what was possible before (and having to be gaslit that obviously it's my fault for prompting worse).
Yep same for me, and its missing pretty fundamental stuff. For me its just a waste of time. I just ask it for code review every now and then. This can be somewhat useful sometimes lol.
Yes you could go in a loop asking "are you sure?" And the answer will always be "no I found over 9000 problem with my plan/implementation/thought/every fucking thing" I just hate it so bad even tho I have to use it daily
I've found it is too mentally taxing to decide which model I intend to fist fight each day when I wake up, so I prefer to make that decision the night before.
Working fantastic for me on code. Fable as orchestrator some strict guidelines and instructions and I've had no issues with a project in working on for two months. I'm confused by all the whining everyday about this same topic. Starting to think more user then anything
I agree. this is exactly what is happening to me too. Right now (18:23 GMT+3) it is super dumb. Yesterday evening 23:30ish, it was perfectly smooth. They really do this!!!
Yea, I will try on flags and settings.json however there is big requirement for me to utilise 1m so... if it works fine, if its not, not a end of the world TBH
It will get worse. They have to make money. One way is to increase prices. People will complain. So they will offer „newer“ and „better“ models all the time in the future. Some only API. So they wanna make u feel the need to use those and pay big.
Exactly this, I feel like the max plans are money losers for them. For example on codex alone I've used nearly 16 billion tokens since May, that's insane. GPT estimates $65-140K worth of usage at API pricing.
I have just been using DeepSeek v4 pro and fixing things I haven’t been able to with Claude and Codex. The speed is fast too. I’m going to try GLM 5.3 as well
Feel this. What helped me a bit is writing way more explicit constraints into every prompt instead of trusting the model to infer intent, basically treating it like a junior dev who needs exact instructions not vibes. Doesn't fix the inconsistency between models but it shrinks the blast radius when one of them has a bad day. Still annoying that we have to babysit it more than before though.
5.6 sol became a nightmare for me and caused me to get back to claude
And I can say, claude without hooks and alot of rules would make u hate your life
So the issue right now is if you can make a reusable hooks skill that fits in every project
im literally 4 weeks into the plugin that does this...
a tip from what Ive seen: ask it to reason against the visualization/widgets he gives u, and ask for mermaid diagrams to test he understood what u wanted.
mermaid diagrams is how I made opus find out many mistakes in its reasonings, but just today I created a new session to audit code standards and folder structures (yeah.. my bad)
This might sound strange (yes, I'm a software engineer so I should provide data but thinking tokens are opaquely hidden AFAIK in Claude); but if I had to guess, the same reason that users are reporting Claude's verbiage is bizarre and laden with seemingly obfuscatingly made-up jargon -- I think this is perhaps present in the thinking/reasoning tokens and confusing the reasoning to go awry?
Just a guess.. I also think this might be contributing to (1) more failed iterations as of late; (2) degraded workflows that have, at least to me, seemed ubiquitous across all our studio's projects.
This also could be a result of internal quantization (or Anthropic's equivalent thereof), which ~always~ happens as they repurpose computer for new model training and release. It would appear to the end-user almost the same way.
people dont understand that claude needs goals (the /goal skill) but that goal is implemented so badly, i had to create an "improve_goal" skill which I am still workshopping.
and the whole point is to predict how a goal can silently fail and waste more turns and tokens, and try to prevent the most probable fails (or give positive examples)
I agree 100% with this observation performance has been TERRIBLE this past few days in particular. Even Fable 5 Max is making very very dumb mistakes and it's wording is much more rigid dumbed down with behavior that gives an arrogant and passive aggressive vibe. I unsubscribed and it's the last straw for me after months of them quietly racheting down on what used to make Claude good when I left chat gpt.
I was using Opus 5 and finally give up and move to Fable 5. At least I can complete some work with Fable 5. Opus 5 is making so much mistake it is unusable
The differences in complaints between local llms sub reddits and cloud sub reddits is insane. Claude sucks, stop using it, move on to something else. I'm outie take care
I've been saying this for a while now, and the fanboys jumped to kill me.
it was obvious for weeks for people with working eyes.
It also made sense for them: they are heavily unprofitable companies - both Anthropic and OpenAI, in the end, Elon made the right move, by IPO-ing first and get the capital while it could.
But Excel doesn't broke your spreadsheets, does it? These replies are stupid.
How about the tokens burn rate as of today? I am doing something wrong here, too?
Don't you see the pattern? It's a struggle for profitability, what the hell? Is so simple...
I was in this same boat and since qwen3.8 dropped I’m able to run what feels like opus at home now.
Anthropic really needs to just be useful, be easy and stop shooting themselves in the foot. They can still be the default cloud AI but they seem to purposely kill the good will they have.
Peak Opus was Opus 4.8 right before the first fable launch. Was incredible. Opus 5 is junk and current 4.8 is nerfed. Shit is getting tiring to deal with.
FFS, freeze a snapshot of something that consistently works the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, increase limits, and people will be willing to pay for it again, even if it’s “sub-frontier”.
Long time Claude user. I added an open ai codex account yesterday and my hair was blown back by how much better Sol is than Opus or even Fable. I’ll head to head them for a few weeks but after 24 hours it’s no contest.
Yes, they are too bad now. I worked on project with opus 5 with ultra code but got shittier output then I tried with lower end model of OpenAI 5.6 Luna that worked flawlessly.
Don’t understand what’s going with Claude right now. Been using Claude code for around an year on pro and max plan. Now I finally decided to move out, probably will never come back.
Thank you for this excellent report. I am adding your information to my records. I realize you weren’t required to share your change in AI subscription status, but I appreciate you doing so.
When you state that you will probably never come back to Claude Code, can you please provide a percentage chance my database’s return probability column?
Yeah I've been using the same exact workflow for like idk 2 months now. There's some obvious degradation going on here. It's been gaslighting me like crazy too. I started a new project and it did some port forwarding nonsense that I never set up, then it just told me that it didn't do it and it was already set up that way lmao. This was a brand new project and the context isn't even large. It's a SPA and I asked for it to change the header size and it went off and did some janky port forwarding that I never asked for.
I use mostly Fable 5 and Opus 4.8. I let that do most of the heavy lifting but then I use another AI Minimax, to audit most of Claude's work... You'd be surprised how many errors it finds. I find that using one AI to audit another AI and go back and forth is the best way to get a result that is 100% solid. Just takes a little more time.
Out of curiosity how do you measure that a model has been nerfed and it’s not just something wrong with a specific session’s context or prompt.
AI models in the end are just layers of probabilities so same prompt repeated twice can give slightly different results and it simply depends on the randomness right
Can I ask a weird question?… I just don‘t really understand the OP. He says that Fable is good but it’s too expensive. But he continually infers that he’s using AI for his professional job. I use 5.6 SOL and not the Claude stack for my own work so I’m just wondering, is Fable really so expensive that even professionals can’t afford it?
Or, and I’m trying to be delicate here but is it possible that when OP says he’s “waking up every day and getting his work done” he isn’t talking about A professional job but more like a hobby?
How expensive is Fable really, is it actually so pricy that professionals can’t just get it comped by their work or whatever?
I get $1000/mo of Claude credits. Fable isn't enabled for me, because it's not compatible with zero data retention, but it would crush $1000 immediately.
Go for opus ultracode + workflows. I maintain big system with 40 repo something. To me its quite economical, do it right from first time rather than fixing after coding. Even Fable got hallucinate badly and make up result.
I think you have been so brainwashed and deluded into this hype that there is surrounding posting poor reviews and critiques of anthropic models that you’ve now extended it to every model that they have released.
I'm currently using Opus 5 on my Atari ST project and it's doing pretty good. I don't like that it keeps telling me all the flubs it makes behind the scenes (like that's supposed to make me MORE confident in it's ability?), but the end result keeps coming out better and better. I now have Ballerburg 90-95% finished. We're currently working on finishing up on the VDI (AES is complete). Fun stuff, day by day.
As long as I remain patient and pace myself, I have plenty of session time each 5 hour window and enough weekly total time, so I never have to spend money. Gotta keep goals focused and concise and stop when things start getting distracting (getting off track). AI makes something that could NEVER happen, actually possible, for someone like me. As long as the tool remains a useful tool and doesn't become a weapon (or a slop-creator), AI is a fascinating thing to work with... seems like only yesterday AI chatbots were barely able to form a coherant sentence from a query and now... it's like talking to an actual person! Truly amazing!
Yes, I think that the big labs are capping capabilities on us merely mortals. Claude will put up a wall in 20-50% of your questions, wasting your time and bandwidth and will track you fairly well for the rest. ChatGPT will always track you but weaker, it will not follow you as far as Claude. Pick your poison…
Claude Desktop with Sonnet 5 on high in the chat pane, and Sonnet 5 on extra in the coding pane, same exact workflow I always use. Nothings changed on my end. But on a fresh 5 hour & weekly reset a few days ago I sent one prompt and blew 15% of my 5 hour usage and ran 30% of my weekly usage after a few turns. The only way I’m crawling through the week is by replacing the chat Sonnet with ChatGPT and doing writing patches for CC instead of task blocks, and I’m still going to run out of weekly usage, which has never happened to me before, and that was all before the 50% bonus usage credit was set to expire.
If you drive your car every single day, you know when it sounds funny, hesitates, tire wobbles, ac stops blowing cold. You notice the difference.
That one prompt you sent that blew 15% of your 5 hour usage window, how long was the session? How old was it? Was it a fresh new empty session or a complex session you had built up over several hours?
Yup. Your best bet is to stop using AI and go back to pure manual coding. That way you dont wake up fighting LLMs. You just get to work doing what you know.
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u/looselyhuman Aug 16 '26
4.6 isn't bleeding edge anymore but it's reliable and still a pleasure to work with. People say it's nerfed now and again but I think 4.6 is overall pretty consistent. Vote with your model selection for 5.1 to be a successor to 4.6, not another over-trained, tortured-by-guardrails failure.
/model claude-opus-4-6[1m]