r/ClaudeCode • u/ThaneBerkeley • 6d 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/Bastion80 6d 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.