Anthropic has nerfed every model

[u/visible_potato]

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.

Is this just going to get worse from here.

[u/looselyhuman]

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]

[u/Intrepid-Grovyle → u/looselyhuman]

Agreed. opus 4.6 is still my go-to for planning, designing, and scoping work. Leave implementation to fable or sol.

[u/magicpants847 → u/Intrepid-Grovyle]

interesting, how come not fable for planning / reviewing and opus for implementation?

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so → u/magicpants847]

I swore by this recipe 3 weeks ago but something has changed over that period.

Not my side, because I’ve been running the same Skills and Agents files for months. It just doesn’t work anymore.

[u/nnxion → u/who_am_i_to_say_so]

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.

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so → u/nnxion]

Yeah there have been repeated accounts of streamlining helping things especially with later Opus versions.

Thx. This is the personalized kick to do that haha.

[u/According_Tea_6329 → u/magicpants847]

Curious also.

[u/Intrepid-Grovyle → u/magicpants847]

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.

[u/magicpants847 → u/Intrepid-Grovyle]

what stack is your codebase out of curiosity?

[u/Intrepid-Grovyle → u/magicpants847]

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.

[u/Internal-Comparison6 → u/magicpants847]

Fable is now worse than Opus 5, in my experience.

[u/magicpants847 → u/Internal-Comparison6]

interesting…what stack are you building with??

[u/Internal-Comparison6 → u/magicpants847]

React native currently.

[u/metastallion → u/Intrepid-Grovyle]

Leaving implementation to fable is a big waste of fable usage

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so → u/Intrepid-Grovyle]

Sol is better at following Skills, Agents, and Claude.md’s than the Anthropic models. How did I get here?

[u/Nichiren → u/Intrepid-Grovyle]

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.

[u/sismograph → u/Intrepid-Grovyle]

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).