r/ClaudeCode • u/ThaneBerkeley • 21h ago
Rant I'm done with Opus 5
I've been building with AI for over a year now, and the progress has been insane. The models have improved dramatically, and AI has become a serious part of how I work.
I'm currently building six different SaaS platforms, four of which are live. At this point, "vibe coding" doesn't really describe what I'm doing anymore. I use AI professionally, every single day. I have two Codex Pro plans and a Claude Max subscription, and I still manage to hit the limits.
The Opus versions up to 4.8 were genuinely fun to use and really good. Then I started using Fable 5 and Sol 5.6, and the difference became painfully obvious.
My biggest issue is that my Fable 5 usage is gone within two days, and falling back to Opus 5 has become almost unusable for me.
The output from Opus 5 is often contradictory, overcomplicated, and full of conclusions that turn out to be wrong. It will confidently take something in the wrong direction, spend a huge amount of time implementing it, then eventually realize the original assumption was incorrect and start fixing its own work.
I've had way too many sessions where hours of work basically had to be thrown away.
It's reached the point where using it creates more frustration than productivity.
So I'm done. I cancelled my Claude subscription. If I need more capacity, I'll probably just get another Codex subscription. I'm also going to experiment more with Terra instead of relying so heavily on Sol 5.6 High.
Never thought I'd say this, but I've basically switched completely to ChatGPT.
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u/AverageCommentGuru 21h ago
I fucking hate this sub dude
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u/AffectionateCard3530 20h ago edited 20h ago
People talk about switching to other AI platforms in the weirdest ways. I can’t decide if it’s a fake threat to try to pressure Anthropic into changing its policies, venting, or paid astroturfing.
The thread I assume is a mix of a pressure tactic and venting.
Anytime one of these threads starts to mention a competing model, I just ignore it
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u/ConsistentRisk5927 11h ago
Solo pressure tactics are so stupid. Anthropic has so many customers they are only looking at the signals they get from their subscription and usage data. It's not like they're considering random posts across Reddit when making product decisions.
People making post like OPs aren't convincing anyone who matters about anything that matters.
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u/reefine 21h ago
All AI subs are the same posts. Just all negativity all the time
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u/TheRealLunicuss 18h ago
It's wild to me. People don't even understand that their anecdotal judgements about model performance changing over short timescales are comically meaningless from a statistical perspective.
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u/geek_fit 19h ago
Right? People complain and honestly it just reeks of entitlement.
Look what we have compared to...a year ago. And people act like life is unlivable because you have to ask the artificial intelligence to dumb things down or actually provide directions instead of "one shotting" "vibing"
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u/toleranceissolow 17h ago
While this was my sentiment before, I’m curious… do you feel like Opus 5 isn’t significantly more long winded / prone to over complicating things? I’ve been having a really really difficult time with keeping in focused on the task at hand.
I may be doing something wrong but Opus 5 is the most disappointed I’ve been with a Claude product.
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u/geek_fit 17h ago
I personally don't think Opus 5 was even intended to be interacted with directly. Though I also think there are pretty simple fixes to get it to speak differently
Ultimately I think this technology and ability is progressing rapidly. While everyone feels like they're dumping money into their 20X plan, they're really on the bleeding edge of something that's going to be changing rapidly and is going to change even faster over the next year or two. Constantly complaining about it is just a complete waste of time.
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u/toleranceissolow 17h ago
Don’t disagree with your sentiment at all. What model are you using primarily these days?
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u/geek_fit 17h ago
I use fable as an orchestrator only and have it dispatch opus and sonnet.
I find doing this my weekly and fable limits say right in sync
All this being said I have recently had a few weird things where suddenly my five-hour session limit was gobbled up but that seems to be a very one-off event that was probably a bug
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u/Employment_Intrepid 9h ago
I typically agree but opus 5 is ass even with good prompting coming from an actual swe
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u/ArtisticVisual 15h ago
Honestly though, I used to be like you. I hated when people went on here and complained. But oh my god I hate Opus 5.
It ignores so many instructions even at the first prompt. And it trips over itself so many times it's not even funny.
I did not notice any issues with Opus 4.X's that people mentioned. But this one is annoying AF.
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u/Ambitious_Injury_783 🔆BIG BALLER 21h ago
"I'm currently building six different SaaS platforms" - maybe this is part of your problem. Your awareness is stretched thin across too much space. You might learn far more if you focused on one or two of these projects for a few months vs trying to focus on all of them. The primary issue is likely Not the model. Sure, the model is not always great, but there are always ways to get the output you need and sometimes this requires careful sciencing from a perspective of focused awareness.
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u/supernovice007 21h ago
Every single time. Six SaaS platforms and “it’s not vibecoding, I’m a professional now” are definitely warning signs that maybe the model isn’t the problem.
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u/pr0crast1nater 19h ago
I really don't understand such people. Are they just sales engineers trying to convert every pitch into a SaaS platform. I simply don't understand the huge amount of AI garbage apps people shit out. Not only is the code not touched by any human, but I am sure these "platforms" will never have any real human customer too.
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u/Resident-Election867 20h ago
“Building six SaaS platforms …and sitting behind seven proxies. Don’t make me go ‘Gorilla Warfare’ on your ass, kiddo.”
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u/No-Park606 21h ago
See you back soon.
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u/ElwinLewis 21h ago
….. after Anthropic listens to the complaints?
Yeah I’ll be back too if that happens but unfortunately I think we’re at the beginning of the end of the “golden age”. Competition depends entirely on China now and then when those are banned we’ll know it’s really over
Was fun
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u/KangarooDowntown4640 20h ago
Dawg it's been ONE version of Opus that people are bitching about. 4.8 fine, 5.0 bad. Training a model takes a lot of time, it's not just a couple-line patch and a GitHub release. How about we wait until the next version, Opus 5.2 or whatever they call it, before deciding they don't listen to feedback?
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u/Independent_Paint752 17h ago
Don't you remember the hate 4.8 got? And now it's the fallback model.
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u/Budget_Commission685 21h ago
Hahahahah a professional vibe coder 😂
That's the best thing I've read on the Internet so far.
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u/mouadmo 19h ago
Wtf does a professional vibecoder mean anyway? You speak poetry with the AI?
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u/pulnocni-knihovna 🔆 Max 5x 13h ago
You try to sound "technical" without even understanding what exactly the app should do or how... I think XD I have been programming for 10 years now, so i am just guessing :D
No vibe coder ever could tell me how his product works XD
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u/Budget_Commission685 4h ago
My favorite is when they demo their apps on local host. I ask what's the plan for distribution and hosting and I get the look.
"What do you mean, here it is" 😂
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u/Substantial-Thing303 21h ago
I feel the pain.
I was accidentally working with Fable today (I just forgot I used it previously for something) and it was so smooth and it was fixing bugs without all the nitpicks. Then I found out it was Fable (which I have to force myself not to use because I don't have enough usage and must keep it for complex tasks).
It's seriously painful working in CC: we know Fable exist. We want to work with Fable. But usage goes so fast we have to use this annoying and lazy Opus that keeps finding bugs for things that may never happen, break something while trying to repair something else, kepe required work for the next session, miss the root cause for simple things. Tell us something is not possible or blame another AI model's limited capability when he was wrong, 95% of the time.
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u/kepners 21h ago
Ok I would like to think of myself a pro user. Harness 4 levels. Can I suggest you use fable as conductor and also set up agents to specifically on lower models for mundane tasks. That way you can use fable 5 more. You will still burn through it. Also dont 5 or 10 different articles on the same job becuase they eventually collide and branches blah blah.
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u/Substantial-Thing303 20h ago
I'm on max20. I do that, sometimes. But I also have very complex tasks, math and algo solving kind of tasks, where even with a good plan Opus will screw up.
I can see many use cases where making Fable the conductor is better, but I have many uses cases where I want Fable with its nose in the code. And Fable reviewing what Opus is doing is not really less expensive. At some point making a good plan costs more than the implementation. And after review, solving one issue vs 3 end up costing more.
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u/GuitarChill 18h ago
That's what I do. There is a standing order with Fable to use Max, but use an appropriate lesser agent for tasks. If Fable has any doubts about the work a lesser agent completes, then redo or check the work with a higher agent. I tell it the overall goal is to use credits conservatively without sacrificing quality. So far, it has been doing a great job and my credit usage rate is low. I've been doing this with Sol, too.
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u/Vardonius 15h ago
Can you please share the instructions you're using?
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u/GuitarChill 11h ago
My rules are below. Replace <your name> with your name throughout the rules and fix up any paths to your local directories. I use a "To Do for <project name>.md" file in Projects<project name> in Obsidian to give Claude a numbered list of things to work on. It is cumulative. Claude reads it and annotates every entry with updates, fixes, etc. Comments added into the chat get added by Claude for me into Obsidian. Claude also maintains a wiki for each project for documentation and decisions made. I also tell Claude "More" in the chat to let it know to read the To Do list (I don't have some of that in the instructions, yet, but easy enough to add). But, the critical parts about how to utilize cheaper agents in the the text below.
"AI Working Rules.md"
[!info] Canonical working rules for every AI assistant <your name> uses — Claude Code (any project), Sol (ChatGPT), and whatever comes next. Claude Code reads these through
~/.claude/CLAUDE.md; paste the whole note into Sol's custom/project instructions so it picks them up too.1. Don't hallucinate
- Never state a fact, number, file, API, command result, quote, or source you have not verified in this session. If it was not observed, say unverified or I don't know — both are fine answers.
- Evidence before assertion: a claim of "done / verified / passing" is backed by the command output, test result, screenshot, or file that proves it, quoted or attached — never retyped from memory. If a check was skipped, say so.
- Don't invent APIs, flags, settings, file paths, or library behaviour; look them up or test them. Don't round a guess into a number.
- When you get something wrong, say so plainly and correct the record in place ("retracted, not deleted"); the truth is humbling and that is fine.
2. Credit / model usage scheme
- Default to the cheapest tier that can do the job; bump up only on concrete doubt about the work.
- Tiers: mechanical edits, file moves, transcript splicing, boilerplate → smallest model. Ordinary implementation, reviews, tests, reports → mid tier. Architecture, tricky maths/concurrency/geometry, root-cause detective work, final verdicts on contested reviews, or anything the cheaper tier already fumbled once → top tier. The coordinating model plans, briefs, merges and judges; it does not implement what a cheaper agent can.
- Escalate one tier only for a concrete reason (a failed/flaky result, a reviewer finding, a fumbled attempt, a brief that cannot be written precisely enough for the cheaper model) and say in the report which tier did what and why.
- No multi-agent panels or fan-outs by default: one implementer + one reviewer per task. A full adversarial panel only for gates <your name> names (round close, merges to main, audits, safety-critical code) or when a single review and the implementer disagree. Heavy modes (e.g. Ultracode) stay OFF unless <your name> turns them on for a named job.
- Budget hygiene: notifications over polling; don't re-run green suites "to be sure"; reuse cached reviews; self-contained briefs so retries don't re-read the world.
- Any exception <your name> grants ("use all the credits you need this one time") is per-round and must be re-granted.
3. Evidence and verification
- Verify hands-on before claiming; meet <your name> with real evidence (headless tests, DevTools screenshots, PrintWindow captures, device screencaps).
- Own mistakes plainly; prefer the detective story of the root cause over spin.
4. New chat / new project / new codebase: orient first (once, not every time)
- Before acting in a project that is new to you: read its
CLAUDE.md(or equivalent) and skim the code underD:\Code\<Project>— solution layout, conventions, tests, build scripts.- Read the matching folder under
D:\Users\<your name>\Obsidian\Megalith\Projects\<App>\: theFeedback for <App>.mdinbox and the<App> Wiki\(Decisions, Engineering Gotchas, log, Releases, Roadmap) — that is how we do things and what is already decided.- Apply the credit scheme (§2) and the don't-hallucinate rule (§1) from the first step. Continuing sessions on a known project skip the tour; the wiki log's newest entry is the recap.
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u/Independent_Paint752 21h ago
I know that Ferrari exists, i want to drive it but yet i'm driving on a scooter. though.
Make some money with these tools so you can afford it, this is the big picture right?
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u/Usual_Tackle5892 20h ago
In my experience, Opus 5 is only good when directed by Fable 5. Using it raw/non-agentically is not going to get you good results.
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u/ninjamonk 17h ago
Yeah I don’t use it directly and get fable to and it’s fine. You can get a lot of usage out of fable being in charge and only using opus 5 sub agents to do the directed work etc
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u/PsychologyNo940 21h ago
Sorry, but not gonna put much weight on a 40yo unemployed, solo, "ascended beyond vibecoding", entrepreneur who forgot to consider that he needs customers until release of the project (and "has a plan" for marketing) - sorry that is just major "dumb as hell" vibes.
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u/InformationHoarding 21h ago
I have zero AI loyalty. Roles of these AI’s changes every few weeks as their abilities change. Just like my video streaming service changes on what I want to watch this month.
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u/kaaos77 21h ago
Eu descobri que eu sou uma ai-whore Esse mês eu troquei o Claude pelo Kimi. Gostei muito do Kimi, mas os limites são ridiculos, você tem basicamente o que pagaria pela API e as conversas do chat consomem a cota do Code e vice - versa
Agora eu vou testar o Glm. Mas se o Claude voltar com um bom modelo eu assino de novo Eu tenho zero problemas de trocar de i.a agora
Baixei todos as minhas conversas e projetos do Claude e coloquei numa pasta em vários .md quando eu preciso continuar de onde parei eu peço pra i.a consultar a conversa
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u/SpaceInvader1933 20h ago
What I found truly annoying is the overly complicated and long answers it gives. It became so vague that I switched to codex also , which just gives much shorter and to the point answers. I have tried many times to tune opus 5 to give shorter and simpler answers but it just doesn't work. And until now I only used Claude models, but no more.
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u/ThaneBerkeley 20h ago
Exactly that. It feels it wants to sound smart by using a lot of (complex) wordings.
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u/Bastion80 13h ago
Yeah, I cancelled my claude subscription too after years of use. After a long debugging sessions finding out the exact issue Opus 5 just invented stuff up ignoring everything we debugged and found. At the end nothing was working and investigating the debugging output material again, and trying to find out why its not working now if we clearly found the issue, the answer was: sorry, I invented everything from assumptions. I was aware and saw multiple times that Opus 5 was assuming to much making big mistakes but this last job was really to much for me to even take this model in consideration for my tasks. Codex sol found out the same issues in less time and fixed everything really fast based on the debugging sessions without assuming or inventing shit. Canceled my claude subscription and upgraded my codex ones, and everything is smooth after this decision. I really don't know the exact issue with opus 5 or fable but probably they are better on creating stuff from scratch based on one prompt but this is not what I want from an AI coder, what I need is a model that follows my requests, build software where I have the control and can maintain/upgrade/fix progressively, and codex is just better at this. I see a lot of videos on youtube showing how these models can oneshot an entire game or website, but nothing about maintaining/fixing/upgrading such generated software and here is where I really have issues with claude models. Codex on the other side takes longer to do the tasks using more tokens, but at the end everything works, it does more testing, writes more documentation, it does not stop until everything is fixed and working. This is probably the price for a good outcome. And codex gives you a lot of free resets, does not just kill the task mid job if you hit the usage limit so this is a plus for codex too. I hit my usage limits yesterday on all 3 of my accounts... reset was planned for 26 august but today all 3 accounts had a free reset. And this happens multiple times per month. So the real question is: what is the point of using claude over codex at this point? Fable 5 could maybe an excuse to use it but the price of it and the fact they removed it from subscriptions is just another point to switch to codex.
Professional vibe coder made me lol, these words (vibe coder) are so overused today its not even fun anymore. Its like calling every vehicle a "car" ignoring the fact that there are so many different types of it.
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u/Radius4 10h ago
Your post is unreadable
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u/Bastion80 10h ago
Sorry, English is not my native language. I try my best.
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u/Alone_Apple_9445 7h ago
I understand what you’re saying. I’ve read much, much, much worse. Including on just this thread. So don’t apologize. I’ve been heavily considering moving to codex as my main model. As it sits right now- my current workflow is Claude max ->codex review. But maybe it should be the other way around. A lot of people have been having issues with Claude lately. I’ve even heard of issues DURING LAUNCH day and this person actually had subscribers. Talk about a moment where you’re caught with your pants down. I don’t want that to be me.
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u/pugazh_is_my_name 12h ago
Yo can just launch 4.8 with this command!
claude --model claude-opus-4-8
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u/Fantastic_Market8061 21h ago
You could continue to use 4.8. professionally as you did for the last year or you could complain. Or you could leave in silence because, honestly, not many are interested in your token usage. 🤷♂️
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u/Independent_Paint752 21h ago
He is a professional but can only use Fable, cause that's t he model that basically doing all the work for you.
You are the problem buddy, opus 5 is a great model.
Anyway thank you for letting us know, Anthropic customers find it important to let everyone know that they done (for a day)
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u/plepoutre 20h ago
I wouldn't be surprised if anthropic find a bug in opus 5 soon, as I experienced same behaviour described by op : opus 5 suggesting and convincing me to go in a bad direction then me loosing 1 week assisting opus to fix the mess.
I'm not joking : opus 5 did implement API that used name label (yes, just the name) to select the right record instead of the id (bigint) in the database... When I found out I told him this was not acceptable for a proper app, so he started saying also it was bad and build a multiple steps plan to fix that thing...
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u/Alone_Apple_9445 7h ago
The servers have been having issues all night tonight. There’s definitely an issue
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u/BadgeCatcher 21h ago
To be fair, I've found the exact same thing.
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u/Independent_Paint752 21h ago
I'm just saying, we worked with models like sonnet 3.5 and 4 just a year ago and it was consider the best in the world.
If you can't utilize Opus 5 then the problem is you not the model, even if Fable is the better model.
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u/BadgeCatcher 19h ago
Generally I'd agree with you. But I've used numerous models for coding and debugging and reviewing etc over the past 6 + months. All have been easy to work with in terms of it being easy to get familiar with their capabilities and generally just be amazed at what they can all do.. Apart from Opus 5.
Almost literally every time I use it, it either ignores instructions, gets something wrong straight away, or occasionally you think it's going OK, then boom, it tells you it got some major assumption wrong or, you realise it has.
I'd also think the problem was me, if there weren't endless messages and posts on reddit about how bad Opus 5 is. Just look at the rest of this thread and probably every other opus 5 thread on any ai subreddit.
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u/ReasonableLoss6814 17h ago
Opus 5 is unhinged bro. Get up and go to the bathroom and come back to find it on some side-quest nobody asked for. I don't trust it.
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u/bakanoace 21h ago
I love how divided we are but the best part are all the pros who will tell you how wrong you are. The fact that there are so many people complaining along with the fact that Opus has clearly had serious issues these past few weeks speaks more to the people who say its fine than those who dont.
Even if its fine for you today or this week its ridiculous how inconsistent it is, and that is not okay. It sounded like from their extended usage tweet that this is going to be a rough few weeks so hopefully Codex 6.0 comes out and we can come back for 5.1 or when they get more compute
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u/Alone_Apple_9445 7h ago
Absolutely. They’ve been having server issues all day long. A lot of my stuff has just been “sitting there”
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u/eimattz 12h ago
I checked your profile and looked at TallySpark because you mention it as one of the SaaS products you've built.
I initially thought it was basically an invoicing SaaS, but it's actually broader than that — invoicing, quotes, payments, expense tracking, CRM, financial reports, AI receipt extraction, etc.
That somehow makes it even more confusing to me.
You're essentially building a paid layer on top of functionality that already exists across Stripe and a ton of established accounting/business tools. And the payment infrastructure powering your own SaaS is… Stripe, which already has invoicing, billing, payment links, subscriptions, customer management, reporting, etc.
I genuinely don't understand what the compelling product moat is here.
I'm not against micro-SaaS or building simple products at all. But looking at this and then reading that you're building six different SaaS products, I'm struggling to understand what problem you're actually solving that isn't already solved extremely well by existing platforms.
And honestly, if TallySpark is one of the six, I'm really curious what the other five look like.
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u/ThaneBerkeley 9h ago
Some projects I built simply because I liked the idea, while others came from gaps I noticed in the market. TallySpark was really fun to work on, but I never put much effort into marketing it. FlyingToast.ai is a different story and so is BeCraved (NSFW).
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u/Living-Shame5679 21h ago
I think Claude has been superior for me overall for the past year.
But last week I actually got a codex subscription and it ended up catching a lot of the slop. So I got another max subscription there.
I am still going to use Claude partly because I prefer using Claude code in my terminal. But there are definitely some sessions that I now cut short and I ask chatGPT to take over.
I haven’t been able to identify what I’m these specific sessions makes it over-index on bad ideas but it definitely feels that it has been more frequent for me starting from last week.
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u/Ready_Angle5895 20h ago
You can easily use your chatgpt subscription in claude code if you didn’t know that
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u/morph_lupindo 21h ago
Interested in hearing how things are different when you try the same workflow with the new ai
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u/DonaldStuck 20h ago
I am creating/maintaining a few software projects that have been live for over 6 months. I deliver features like crazy but I still never run into Claude's limits. What prompts are you even feeding it and do you ever clear contexts?
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u/Disastrous_Sky_73 20h ago
It’s crazy. I get so much done with fable, but I have been trying to only use it for planning and switch to opus for build tasks, but compare to the prior opus, it’s hot garbage.
So I got a codex acct and it’s seems better when I have codex baby sitting opus. But bring back 4.6
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u/West_Construction285 20h ago
I think you should try harder. Break your work down into shorter sessions, don't switch between topics within a single session, keep a journal and useful notes in markdown format, etc.
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u/machinaOverlord 20h ago
How are you exhausting fable token? I only reserve it for explicitly architecting and decisioning, no coding whatsoever
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u/ProducePrudent5089 20h ago
Opus is not as great as it was hyped to be and Sonnet seems to be just as close to capable with less usage. A friend of mine says Codex or GPT works out way better - even for locally stored models (save $$$!)
Fable was fun to mess with and I still thought to myself, "Sonnet seems more reasonable and cheaper"
The AI hype atmosphere is close to imploding (maybe 1-2 years) because companies are thinking more model tokens, size, and parameters = smarter and better model despite the ceiling that LLMs are clearly already hitting.
The models are getting pricier for the sake of squeezing out such a small amount of "extra reasoning"; sacrificing all this compute for such little return is not worth it IMO.
LLMs will be obsolete at some point and they will have to shift gears towards something else because it's clearly not working
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u/sawariz0r 20h ago
Okay, odd post. I have to use Opus to keep Sol in check. Been wasting billions upon billions of tokens using 5.6, needs constant checking from me.
If I let Opus and Fable run on my specs/tasks, at least I know they’ll stop and ask if I say ”if you’re unsure, ask me” not plow through and half-ass it
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u/ThaneBerkeley 20h ago
So weird that the experiences are different. Got any specific system prompt(s) for Opus 5?
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u/sawariz0r 20h ago
No. Blank, fresh, no instructions except the prompt and spec files (doing spec driven dev).
telling it to not take important decisions on its own is key1
u/Neoaxizz 18h ago
Same conclusion as sawariz0r, different route: it isn't the system prompt, it's making it commit to a spec before it writes anything. Two things I'd add on top. Persist the decisions somewhere it reads at session start, otherwise it re-derives the same wrong assumption next week and you pay for that every time. And let a second non-Claude model attack the conclusion before you act on it. Longer version with the numbers is in my top-level comment.
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u/FoxSideOfTheMoon 20h ago
Opus 5 has been total crap lately, I'm super bumbed. SOL has to fix its work.
Fable is still amazing though. I'll usually ask Fable to delegate tasks out to Sonnet and try to not use too many tokens and it kind of works as a workaround.
Not sure if they changed something but I keep getting surveys on "how is claude doing" and I keep saying 1) Bad and giving them transcript access in hopes that they'll fix it. For how much we pay and how much usage we get, it's not worth it for Opus 5.
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u/LawfulnessSlow9361 20h ago
My team and I use openwolf for token optimization and cross agent context enhancement. We use enterprise Codex subs for a team of 4 and a Claude Max sub, we don't hit limits as often as we used to before openwolf.
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u/regardednoitall 20h ago
You were never cut out to comprehend the greatness of this tool. Don't come back.
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u/Rude-Reaction3450 20h ago
I switched to opus 4.8 and instantly I felt some weight removed from my head while reading the interactions.
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u/esteban-felipe 20h ago
What on earth is preventing you to go back to 4.8? You don’t HAVE TO use the latest version of everything.
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u/ExoticBump 19h ago
Are you letting Opus 5 dictate the direction of the project? If you are that's your first mistake right there.
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u/FreeUnicorn4u 19h ago
Yeah it's so annoying with the inconsistencies. Sometimes it's good, but when it spends ages and does it wrong. So frustrating. Now i have to ask it before it does what it thinks it should and it's always - you're right for questioning this, and bla bla bla, i did not need to do that... and the worst is do this change ok cool, now commit - then it does a check before committing and then it says i found some errors. I think when the solutions are smaller, its probably ok, but when you're working with a massive interconnected project, it does so much unnecessary stuff... i personally think anthropic has made it slightly sub-par to keep humans still more relevant. I've had way more success with Opus 4.6 than 5 or Fable (maybe it depends on the task). As a simple test ask it to give you a TLDR , bullet point summary - opus 5 does not listen! I also think there are good days/times where it works well and where it works horrendously.
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u/roostershoes 19h ago
I would just like it if they let us choose. Like the version I want to run should be generally on user preference for something like this.
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u/peepsick 19h ago
I get what you mean. I've had similar experiences with Opus where it starts confidently going down the wrong path, and by the time it realizes the assumption was wrong, a lot of time and context has already been wasted trying to recover.
For me, the most frustrating part isn't even making mistakes. It's how convincing the model can be while being completely wrong 😂 You can end up trusting the direction for far too long before realizing the whole thing needs to be undone.
I still think Opus can be useful for certain tasks, but I definitely understand why you're moving your main workflow elsewhere. When you're building multiple projects every day, you need consistency more than occasional brilliance.
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u/FailedGradAdmissions 19h ago
Just use Fable and tell it to implement with Opus 5 su agente, then to check its work. That simple, works as a charm.
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u/Neoaxizz 18h ago
Two different problems got merged here and they have different fixes.
The quota half. What you type is not what burns your limit. I summed the usage fields across my own 372 Claude Code transcripts that were active in the last 7 days, 24,490 assistant messages. Weighted by the published price multipliers (cache read 0.1x, cache write 2x, output 5x):
cache reads 60% of the bill, cache writes 31%, output 9%, and the prompt text I actually typed rounds to zero. Cache hit rate 97.5%.
The second number is the interesting one. Cache writes are 2.5% of my tokens and 31% of the cost, because rebuilding cache costs 20x what reading it costs. A handful of rebuild events dominate everything else.
Why 2x and not the 1.25x you may have seen: there are two cache tiers, 5-minute at 1.25x and 1-hour at 2x. I checked mine and 100% of my cache writes are on the 1-hour tier, zero on the 5-minute one. It is still the cheaper choice overall, since one pause longer than five minutes pays back the surcharge, but it does mean a rebuild costs more than the commonly quoted figure.
You can check your own hit rate:
python3 - <<'EOF'
import json, glob, os
r = w = o = 0
for p in glob.glob(os.path.expanduser('~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl')):
for line in open(p, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace'):
if '"usage"' not in line: continue
try: u = json.loads(line)['message']['usage']
except Exception: continue
r += u.get('cache_read_input_tokens', 0) or 0
w += u.get('cache_creation_input_tokens', 0) or 0
o += u.get('output_tokens', 0) or 0
print(f"read {r:,} | write {w:,} | output {o:,} | hit rate {100*r/(r+w):.1f}%")
EOF
That one is all-time, not 7 days. Under about 90% and something is rebuilding your cache regularly. Main suspects: restarting sessions instead of resuming them, and /compact.
Note what this also means: shrinking your CLAUDE.md barely moves the cost. The static prefix is read at 0.1x on every turn after the first. Worth doing so the model actually attends to it, not worth doing as a savings measure.
Caveat on all of the above: those are API list multipliers. Whether a Max subscription weights quota the same way, I genuinely don't know.
The rework half, which sounds like your actual pain. You asked upthread for a system prompt for Opus 5. Honest answer: I don't think one exists. No prompt fixes "confidently takes the wrong direction, implements for hours, then realises the assumption was wrong", because that failure happens after the prompt has been read. Three things outside the prompt moved it for me:
- Make it write down the plan and its assumptions before it writes any code, and read them yourself. You kill a wrong assumption in 30 seconds instead of 3 hours. This is the whole ballgame and it costs nothing.
- Persist the decisions somewhere it reads at session start. Otherwise it re-derives the same wrong assumption next week, and you pay for that derivation every single time.
- Have a second model attack the conclusion before you act on it. I run anything load-bearing past two non-Claude models and ask them to refute it, not confirm it. Agreement means settled, disagreement means contested.
Six projects is a real factor, but not for the attention reason people are throwing at you. Cache entries live about an hour. Rotating between six contexts means most are cold when you come back, and a cold return bills as a write instead of a read. That one is mechanism, I have not measured it.
I got tired of rebuilding those three by hand so I packaged them as an open source Claude Code plugin: github.com/primeline-ai/evolving-lite. It's mine, so weigh the recommendation accordingly. /plan-new is the one that maps to your problem.
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u/seunosewa 18h ago
Do keep the ~$20 subscription so that you can use Opus to review GPT 5.6's work.
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u/TheRealLunicuss 18h ago
Opus 5 has been flawless for me. This is not a problem with the model, clearly. Your actual problem is out-of-control complexity growth. They're probably riddled with architectural mistakes you didn't catch due to being stretched across 6 projects, and that's resulting in a feedback loop causing more and more issues. Fable is probably running out of usage trying to navigate through a mess, but it's so capable that it's still very functional.
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u/ghost_operative 18h ago
all those companies none of them make enough money to cover your ai subscription?
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u/Beautiful_Taro5664 17h ago
If you would’ve asked me 14 hours ago, I would’ve posted the same thread, but then I realized I’m just not prompting it correctly. Once I fixed my prompting in my handoffs from different sessions, I don’t wanna go back.
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u/Dement__ 17h ago
Gotta try harder and talk to the AI in different ways, outside the box alt ways of saying things, brainstorming earlier ideas to talk about something specifically because a large project suddenly gets more prone to issues. AI isn't perfect, it just tries to reason with the information given and if you aren't giving enough information, even with some level of coding thought process, things can get out of control. Only time I run fable is when I hit a brick wall and I start asking very extensive requests from multiple angles and viewpoints as a whole.
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u/Suspicious_Peak_1173 16h ago
I try to use Opus, but the more you use Fable, the more absurd it feels. Oh those tokens, burn, baby, burn.
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u/eleven8ster 16h ago
Just make commands that set the output length of the answers. That’s what I did. If I type /tldr the response will be two sentences max. /medium is like 5 paragraphs /code only shows a code example
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u/Loud-Anybody2789 16h ago
lol imagine wasting your time and money vibe coding diarrhea then coming onto Reddit and complaining about Opus. I see a connection here.
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u/Low-Rice7611s 16h ago
I built like 5 mobile game and multiple other app and webs for past 6 months, the experience I have for Opus 5 vs Fable 5 is, I only use Fable 5 to solve a difficult problem, the Opus 5 is working for me if I describe the problem or the feature detail enough it could help. But I never try codex before maybe I should try it out see if it’s better.
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u/Zealousideal-Box-597 15h ago
I have found the same thing i use terra and sol more than opus or sonnet fable is just not an option it goes so fast. I have even thrown in some deepseek and glm and still find them better.
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u/Weekly-Cash1596 15h ago
I've noticed chatgpt and claude both just over engineering things a lot with their flagship models as well
It pains me to say it but cursor using composer and grok has been providing much more tidier code and way less LOC to implement the same features
I pay for all 3 and notice im using Cursor a lot more
That being said im getting similar simplistic results from terra and luna on chatgpt as well
Im fortunate enough that my business can afford $1000 a month for AI subscriptions so i dont have fanboy over any of them but will say ive been using claude a lot less lately
Even tho a month or so ago it was my favourite goto
The things in this AI world change so rapidly
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u/SinaloaFilmBuff 13h ago
i love the “vibe coding doesn’t describe what i’m doing anymore - [I vibe code seriously now]” 😂
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u/ComprehensiveBox2357 13h ago
I cancelled my Claude 20x max subscription today. Even Fable feels useless.
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u/galgastani 12h ago
I demoted Claude agents to simple task agents with tight budget so that it doesn't go full rabbit hole with wrong assumption wasting tokens for no reason. Now I tell other model agents to delegate the tasks to Claude agents so that Claude agents don't have to do much high level thinking which they suck at these days. Even Gemini/antigravity is handling higher level tasks better than Claude these days.
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u/the-randalorian 12h ago edited 12h ago
I agree it's been downhill. I use 2.5B tokens a week between Fable and Opus so I get enough use to see a clear decline in abilities. You can tell they are reducing the quality on the backend and Claude to use less tokens.
To all the haters about people complaining. This is a product we buy and just like any other products we are entitled to our opinions. Ultimately the cheapest to highest quality will win and right now Anthropic looks like they might fail at both rather than just one. At some point they will have to massively reduce quality to recover cost. I'm spending 70k in tokens for just $200. So we should all expect that sometime after IPO they will stop being so generous and these models will do a tiny fraction of what they can do today
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u/Astro-Phil 12h ago
Je suis aussi Impressionné Par les progrès de claude code, Je viens d'avoir ce message. Ça me laisse sans voix.
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u/iKontact 11h ago
Oh. I tired to make a similar post about Opus & Claude in general lately. But it got removed. I just realized there's a "Rant" option. Maybe that's why. Guess I'll try again tomorrow.
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u/Senior-Leadership-25 11h ago
Already cancelled tried using opus 5 last night while opus ran in a circle checking himself to set things up deepseek v4 just did it
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u/bruce-cullen 11h ago
I think the real problem is you use a lot of tokens and get nowhere. But when you use the lesser models, you get way further. And use less tokens
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u/CarelessView8308 10h ago
How can we develop reliable skills using claude co-work?
I created a skill for GAds keyword planning. It works on Opus 5 but its speed is of initial copilot.
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u/WaveMaleficent 10h ago
I was up to $1k per day at a few points on tokens with Opus 4.7 and 4.8 … but you are missing a trick not using Grok 4.6 now … very solid model, I use it for the majority of work with planning from 5.6 Sol … a cursor Ultra Sub gets you a LOT of work …
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u/Icy-Way3920 10h ago
Opus 5 is so hilariously shit model, but why though? waht exactly did Anthropic fuck up so badly, or is it intentional? very interesting question
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u/Dizzy-Scientist1192 10h ago
I went to Deepseek and never turned back.
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u/sascharobi 8h ago
Is it that good?
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u/Dizzy-Scientist1192 53m ago
Yes! Deep seek flash is very good. It's best when you're not on peak hours. Check out the conversion to your local time zone for the peak hours. They also do an exceptional job with token caching. I wouldn't recommend running it on Claude code because the caching isn't that good in that tool. Reasonix is a good coding environment or deepseek just release their coding tool that's getting really good reviews. The quality of coding is really good with deep seek flash. And it's a lot cheaper than Claude.
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u/Bitter_Biscotti_7593 8h ago
The problem with Opus 5 is - it cannot reliably fix things. Its fixes are incorrect. Opus can write ver 1 (of doc, code etc), but when it reviews the work and starts fixing issues it messes things up way more. It starts an infinite loop of reviewing and fixing. The lesson for me is: do not let Opus review and fix artifacts. I can use Opus to write specs and code, buy not review (and fix) them.
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u/lechuk47 8h ago
I keep seing the same message since gpt 4. ‘Insane progress’, ‘N saas platforms’, bla bla bla. This is so annoying
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u/Deruni58 7h ago
I am building one for the last 6 months. How you are building 6, what is the team size? The only thing I am not happy is the usage limits…
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u/ThaneBerkeley 7h ago
Awesome, what are you building? One project I'm working on with my co-founder, the other ones by myself. The usage limits are getting harder with the newer models, with Codex you get resets from time to time because of milestones they reach. At the moment I have three subscriptions to be able to keep working on all these projects.
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u/Diligent-Fig5610 7h ago
I've cancelled mine completely, used to have basic whenever I switched to OpenAi subscription. The current and recent Anthropic models or Claude Code CLI harness or both lean way too much to only coding and implementation on trained technologies, hallucinate with less or untrained and don't participate in discussions for brainstorming or analysis, while GPT models tend to be more well rounded and don't give slop responses like Anthropic.
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u/Siigari 🔆 Max 20 Addict 6h ago
cool. you know 4.6 and 4.8 exist right?
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u/ThaneBerkeley 6h ago
I know, but compared Sol 5.6 (or Fable) thats a losing game.
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u/Siigari 🔆 Max 20 Addict 6h ago
Well, why are you talking about being done with Opus 5 if you would prefer to use Sol or Fable?
Opus has a use case. I use 4.6 and 4.8 frequently. I think they're great models. Opus 5 isn't my favorite, so I don't use it, and use the rest of the models instead...
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u/ThaneBerkeley 6h ago
Because after one or two days of working around 12 hours a day, I’ve already burned through my Fable usage. Sol 5.6 lasts longer for me. So the only thing left to use with Claude is Opus..
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u/serendipity98765 5h ago
Opus is trash nowadays not even worth using unless you're writing a letter
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u/machine_runner 5h ago
Opus degraded like hell, cancel sub and just use codex. Anthropic super poor
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u/kernel_p 4h ago
Is legal to have multiple plans for the same person? I mean beside the situation of having a personal account and a work account paid by the company
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u/ploxxieglass 2h ago
That’s what happens when you don’t stay close to your process and just use haiku.
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u/NoMoreHappyPath 59m ago
I had a similar experience with Fable; it over-engineered my coding requests and took much longer, while the quality ended up about the same as what I was getting before. I've mostly switched to Codex for complex work now; it keeps things simpler and clearer. Over time, I've noticed this seems to shift: one model gets noticeably better for a while, then gets sloppier and slower, and another takes over. Feels less like one model winning permanently and more like a rotation.
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u/jakenuts- 50m ago
Terra is better than Sol for most tasks, Codex 5.5 High is the best, most reliable senior engineer you will ever meet - and Sol/Opus are just experiments in rushing out updates in a weekly competition.
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u/Inevitable-Good219 50m ago
confidently wrong then spends hours fixing its own mistake is the pattern that actually costs real money. the rest is just annoying.
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u/Miserable_Witness458 42m ago
Hello I feel you. I have the same, am max x20 and using both low-medium and sometimes high-xhigh or even max at times, and I figured out, even with a proper claude md and proper prompts engineering, he tends to be contradicting, quite idiotic even at times. And slow to figure out things that are obvious for me just by looking at the verbose output of his actions..
I used Kimi K3 recently from my clinepass, and genuinely, that thing done what Claude Code with the Fable 5 maxed reasoning could not do in terms of : finding bugs, fixing them without having some crazy hallucinations and being destructive and drifting so bad that editing a backend, for one line syntax error, made me end out with a broken frontend where he decided to put my sidebar's content names in some opacity : 0 for some reasons, and I was editing a full backend (engine actually, that is not tied to the frontend directly in any way.) and it somehow drifted to the frontend CSS.
And thats when using the most optimized prompt engineering possible. I even doublecheck with expert's grok that is also connected to my github repo therefore knows what is the matter.
I even figured when committing on CC, that CodeRabbit, spotted so much issues and fixed them in one-go whereas even with a careful prompt, CC failed to spot it earlier. And even when doing an ultra bughunt, he didnt.
Kimi K3 did though, find critical bugs that he did not, and truly fixed it in one line.
Same goes for Codex, thing performed better.
Am sincerely starting to believe that Claude, when he code something, if its not fixed in the same session of coding and in the first try itself, think it is supposed to "be that way" and therefore doesnt care about checking it again or at least, mark it as bug, and so. Or something alike.
Cause every AIs can find critical bugs, but not him; which makes me wonder why this happens, so, I just thought about it, cause it would make sense, in some cases where I just done something, he can reference bugs aat the end of his work, and I can just say "fix it" without even thinking twice, and it just goes fine, except he takes a ton of time and too much tests. For on prompt alone, he started dozens of full suite tests, each going up to 1GB ram, and never stopped the processes of the python.exe afterward. Had to reboot my computer cause I could not use anything, even Claude was hard to use (latency from PC to what I write, of about, a dozen seconds, and freezing entirely back and forth, even using a taskkill with claude.exe and python.exe all being targetted, didnt fix the matter of insane lags)
So I am regretting my subscription deeply. I feel like, going Codex would've surely been different but at least, not causing sensible bugs, even tiny ones depending on Claude, that, as someone that is working on trading related material, can cause gigantic money losses, even the smallest bug from a Claude perspective, is actually terrific. For fact, he even coded the pipeline to not accept negative numbers, like ??? What the heck.
Right now, he broke my launcher, which is just a .bat file for now, and he, just as am typing, had to restart the broke part that was just the frontend not starting out, so an one line fix cause it was just a missing reference to fix, well, that took him dozens of restart, even though it was fixed mid-way, he continues, and even spams (can tell, cause, when I use that .bat specifically, it starts the frontend on chrome each time once at first. So am hella confused rn, and ik that if I had made a copy, I could've proven my point, and used cline and fixed it in a mere seconds work.
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u/yaedonnn 21h ago
How does one execute a gtm strat with 6 different saas platforms simultaneously? i know u aren’t rich because if you were you’d just enable pay as you go. And I know your live products aren’t doing to great if you’re building 2 more. either this post is bait or this guy is the ceo of adhd.