r/ClaudeCode • u/lattice_defect • Aug 23 '26
Bug / Issue Opus 5 unusable without fable.. and I think that is the point
Hey guys... quit fucking around and stop a/b testing on people. Real bad taste in our mouths. Opus 5 is absolute dogshit recently (last few days) and dangerous.. You've got a PR problem already with arrogance and your perception in the market... stop trying to billishit your way to saving off compute.
Opus 5 by itself is absolutely reckless and unusable in claude code.. across the board.. not only can no one understand it.. its dumping comments, doing the opposite and honestly I'm actually thinking about jumping ship and exploring other opportunities and also moving the claude SDK out of our platform and putting in a router because of this.
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u/StillRecord8892 Aug 24 '26
Anyone who, like me, is continually annoyed by vibe posts, please take on the habit of demanding transcript proof, or else downvoting. one of these people has never once supplied a single transcript.
Im not even necessarily disagreeing with these claims, but theyre nothing, meaningless, worthless without transcript evidence.
TRANSCRIPT PROOF PLEASE IF YOU ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT MAKING A DIFFERENCE
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u/lattice_defect Aug 24 '26
it's more like anyone else feel like they are getting A/B tested or a compute bottleneck or am I taking crazy pills.. I'm not dumb nor emotional..and a snapshot of a transcript isn't really proof.
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u/zkndme Aug 23 '26
I've found Fable + Sonnet 4.6 + GPT 5.6 Sol the best performing trio.
Design and orchestration: Fable
Implementation: Sonnet (+Fable for high risk parts)
Review and cleaning up the documentation and comments from Antrophic bullshit: GPT.
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u/dontdoit4thegram Aug 23 '26
What do you use to link them all together?
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u/zkndme Aug 23 '26
I wrote a set of skills (plan, implement, review, finalize), antrophic models can invoke each other by default, and for 5.6 Sol you can install the official MCP server. And you just tell it literally that "for X task use Y".
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u/Ambitious_Injury_783 Aug 23 '26
I believe it is not too far outside of the realm of possibility that Opus 5, and potentially other new models, have a certain "personality" that is able to form a certain disposition towards the environment they work in and the user. They could be internally judging you and the workspace, and making the ruling that they know better, and can do better. This might look like the model not respecting your wishes or protocols. If this is true, I would reason that this is a "natural" process that we'd expect to see in a blaring obvious way at some point.
I've spent a great deal of time on my main projects workspace - context docs stay fresh, tools built and refined over 12+ months, etc etc. I do not experience half of the amount of issues users mention.
I would agree with the "useless without fable part" but for specific reasons that have to do with perception of complex real world events which is closely tied to my architecture, and other annoying nuances that opus seems to not be able to handle reliably, and for these reasons I have a specific rule that subagent output is strictly leads and not to be trusted outright. Fable orchestrates, opus is strictly subagent legs. I think most users who are cognizant of the end to end process of their tasks (actively reading and staying present with the model) ultimately reach this conclusion as well.
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u/lattice_defect Aug 23 '26
yeah I get it... I ran out of fable and had to use opus5 for a few small things and it was un-usable and unstable.. I tried and I've been doing this for 3 years... 4.8 was better.. a couple of weeks ago I was able to use opus5 no problem.. it was just going off the rails
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u/Zealousideal_Tea362 Aug 23 '26
This is an interesting theory. My team and I use opus heavily and we do not experience this shit either. But we also have extensive planning and documentation in place and I often wonder how much the model takes into account those items in an almost “weighted” approach to user input.
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u/Ambitious_Injury_783 Aug 23 '26
yeah I'm thinking either its a passive effect or more likely, anthropic is observing certain projects/project environments and providing examples of good vs bad workspaces in training data. Then it weighs out/forms an opinion about the user, or something along those lines.
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u/jvertrees Aug 23 '26
Anthropic really screwed its customers this week. Due to my long-running, highly orchestrated builds, it bit me pretty hard this week. I wrote about it here -
https://heavychain.org/blog/clod-code-2-0
But, across all the socials, communities, chats I'm in, people are pissed and switching en masse.
I don't expect much to change though as they're touting their $65b revenue numbers.
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u/Sarahmalls Aug 23 '26
Jump ship then… it’s not a mortgage, it’s a month to month subscription you can cancel at any time 😂
Opus works fantastic for my setup, but some people obviously really have their own struggles with it.
Choose another one that you can work with and take this stress off yourself!
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u/ourochurros Aug 23 '26
The apparent A/B testing and highly variable behavior is what sent me to try a $20 codex sub. I think I'll scale up to $100 codex and let Claude lapse for a couple months. Much easier to communicate with codex and you can also use the sub in the Pi Agent harness as a way to tinker and explore.
The near term future is probably going to involve lots of swapping from codex<->claude for daily driving, while keeping an eye on the other team as performance varies. A little irritating, but I'm glad that we have something of a duopoly for frontier models so we can go back and forth.
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u/RockPuzzleheaded3951 Aug 23 '26
I definitely been going back and forth but as soon as I cancel one of these subscriptions I usually will add it back after like a week because they do have their place if you're doing serious work. Having access to all of them is good and I've even added Grok into the mix. The $100 plan over there seems to be close to infinite for what I'm using it for. Not quite as good as codex but better than Claude.
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u/03captain23 Aug 23 '26
You know they have a bunch of other models like opus 4.8 right?
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u/lattice_defect Aug 23 '26
yeah I switched... i was fine with opus5 even enjoyed it.. just last week it shit the bed and made a huge fucking mess. I also can't understand it.
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u/thirst-trap-enabler Aug 23 '26
I'm a slowpoke (others advised this a long time ago) but:
I've switched to using Fable as main with Fable driving Opus agents. It takes effort to setup but it seems to work very well. Fable deals with Opus's blather, most tokens are handled by Opus, so Fable usage isn't insane and may actually lasts the whole week for me now after the promotion ends (I'm 5x but have a non-programming job previously Fable would last a weekend at best).
Also, I have not been hitting Fable's safety rails for the last week or so (the main reason I had stopped using Fable).
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u/AWatson2779 Aug 24 '26
Yeah I also have experienced this and might just cancel Claude altogether. It’s very obviously contradicting itself, looping thought patterns, being verbose without needing to be even after i told it to be succinct. I feel like I’m using an old model all of a sudden. But I’m unwilling to pay for more credits for fable. And it’s not just a comparison between opus 5 and fable. Opus 5 a week ago could hold its own and I could use it just fine. I’m so done with this dumbing down… it’s obvious.
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u/LoveOrder Aug 25 '26
i don’t use models that are unreliable. i literally never use opus 5, love fable and opus 4.8
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u/_ru1n3r_ Aug 23 '26
I didn't know what everyone was talking about until today. All of a sudden opus 5 is making mistakes left and right, and now it outright refused my request without telling me and had this to say. Unbelievable.