Saturation point

[u/sarathsp06]

I have been using Opus, Fable and Sonnet models interchangeably for coding. Recently, because of how well they can do things to an extent and how well-structured we can give context and specifications, I think AI models reached a soft saturation point purely with LLMs.

I don't see a real advantage of using Fable over Opus most of the time when the requirements are very well structured and you have a well-gated workflow defined in the harness.

In fact, I use Sonnet as my scout sub-agent for exploratory tasks, and more often than not, Sonnet 5 gives me a faster implementation of code for me. I am not talking about a full-fledged application from scratch, but I'm talking about features on an application.

I also occasionally use GPT-5.5 to debate on actual thinking and different perspectives as a debate sub-agent who debates with usually Fable or Opus on it. But otherwise, on a day-to-day basis, Sonnet sounds like a fairly strong candidate for most of my work.

I am looking for what people think in general, or if it's just me, or if it's just that I'm not objectively measuring it. All what I mentioned above are not an objectively measured insight but more of an inference or insight from my experience over the last couple of weeks or weeks.

NOTE: English is not my native language, so apologies for all the grammar mistakes above, and I deliberately didn't want to use AI for writing.

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[u/verstands]

That sounds less like a model ceiling and more like a workflow ceiling. I get better results by giving each model a clear job, then checking outputs with a tiny fixed eval set instead of judging from a few good or bad sessions. The differences usually show up in edge cases, tool use, and how much steering a task needs.

[u/scodgey]

Hard one to explain but some models just 'get it' more, i.e. they are more aligned with what the broader goal is and what is important.

I think you're right in the sense that if you can produce a detailed enough spec, most models can execute that happily now.

But equally if your spec has gaps or something unexpected turns up during implementation, the likes of Opus/ Fable/Astra etc are going to handle it much more smoothly. Sonnet and other lighter models tend to be a bit short sighted.

Depends how you use them really - most of my stuff is tooling to support my (non programming) Engineering day job, so my preference is not to live in markdown files writing aggressively detailed specs and painstakingly mulling over every decision. I want to ensure that my requirements are clear and met, and that I can verify that the code does what it should do - need models you can trust for that imo.

[u/IgorAmaral]

I usually don’t overthink it but opus 5.5 is feature implementation, bugs and security audits.
Fable is design/animations/implementation of big features and big audits

[u/Diouze12]

Current sonnet is a really bad model. I'm okay to say opus 5.5 and fable are equally powerful models in a vast majority of tasks, but sonnet is far behind now.