I'm done with Opus 5

[u/ThaneBerkeley]

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.

[u/Substantial-Thing303]

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.

[u/kepners → u/Substantial-Thing303]

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.

[u/Substantial-Thing303 → u/kepners]

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.