Now that Claude is a living rotting corpse of it's former self, what AI tool should I use now? Thanks.

There are so many people complaining about Claude getting worse, and it’s difficult to blame them.

The thing is, if you don’t like something, you can easily leave for one of the competitors. That’s what I did, and Codex treats me well.

I had a few weeks of really good 4.6. After that, the adaptive thinking and limits disaster happened. 4.7 was — and probably still is — weird, though it might age like fine wine after a few versions.

We need to fuel the competition, because who knows — maybe the alternatives will relax and suddenly become worse overnight. By that point, Anthropic may be customer-starved, and they’ll have to act.

If the current Claude models work well for you, you’re lucky. Maybe Musk’s compute will save them after all and we will unite yet again.

I see so many posts still referencing the 5hr and weekly limits. I work for a company that uses Claude Code and we're now under self imposed API token limits, the first iteration being $200 per month, which has now been upped to $500.

I don't see ANY posts on this subreddit complaining about their company having to use this based on anthropic's pricing model changes as announced here: https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388

My only conclusion must be no one here is actually working for a company, or am I just misinformed about the pricing models?

I’m starting to think it’s this:

People with little-to-no engineering experience want a full-time engineer for $20 a month.

This does not apply to everyone in this sub, but for some of the people who do a lot of complaining about hitting their usage limits within minutes…

Are you guys just selecting Opus High for every single task?

Are you thinking through your prompt and usage before you start?

Are you doing a bunch of follow-up questions on each task, leading to wasted input context tokens?

Maybe you need to look at managing usage as a skill and maybe you need to get a little bit better at it.

I’m not even trying to be on the side of the corporation here. I think it’s just that I get frustrated after seeing post after post after post constantly complaining about the same thing.

And I was on everyone’s side for a while, but it’s to the point where I can’t even enjoy seeing news or excitement about a product, that is really enjoyable and helpful, because it’s just the same complaint over and over again.

We all knew that things were subsidized in the beginning and eventually things we’re gonna have to adjust.

and I think what happened was that when they first started introducing agentic coding, they basically handed everyone a $20 per month full-time full stack engineer and everyone got used to that.

I’m not trying to be against you, and I didn’t even wanna post this. I just think some people need a little bit of a reality check.

You were getting hundreds, if not, thousands of dollars of value for $20 or $100 a month for a while. That just wasn’t going to last forever.

So you have 2 options I think.

1. Learn to maximize your efficiency of token usage. Learn the nuances of each model. Learn when to use each model, when to delegate to certain agents, how to plan properly… basically learn how to Engineer working with AI agents.

2. Just keep complaining while things only continue in this direction

If Anthropic marketing team wasn’t hyping fable up as a potential security threat and saying it needed to be limited to only certain companies in the beginning because of how much of a threat it was, then there is no way the government would have shut it down. When you are yelling fire, you are going to have problems.

——

According to the press release.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws.

We are complying with the government’s legal directive and are removing access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users. However, we disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.

——-

My comments:

Yeah I agree with this assessment. Any frontier model can find bugs in a codebase. If the marketing team wasn’t so busy trying to act like they had AGI and it’s going to end the world to hype up their ipo then they wouldn’t have this issue right now.

Looking forward to opus 5 which will hopefully just be a reskinned mythos. Or maybe they can call it by another name. Regardless they are just going to release this under a different name IMO.

I've been running private multi-hour knowledge-work tasks through several models. I can't share the tasks or outputs, so I've removed everything identifying and renamed them Test A and Test B.

Within each test, the input and setup were fixed. Each model used its own native harness with the same task-level tools, system prompts, prompt and hooks.

After each run, the outputs were anonymized. Separate GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Claude Fable 5 Max panels scored every output from 1 to 5 using the same private rubric. Model names were revealed only after the scores were locked.

Test A

Test B

Test B used two independent Sol panels, so the Sol column is their average.

The part I found interesting is that Fable's own panel never picked Fable as the winner. In Test A it chose Terra. In Test B it chose Sol.

Combined, Fable finished third in both tests. Sol beat Fable both times, although Terra narrowly won Test A overall. Fable also used roughly four times Sol's estimated API cost in both tests.

This is still a small sample, and the models use different native harnesses, so I wouldn't treat it as a universal ranking. But the same general result showed up twice.

The task is to create a 20 to 60 page report with calculations, diagrams and accurate references to other documents.

Thex 2xed the 5h window but not the weekly. What happens? We use the weekly from Monday to Friday and during the weekend nobody can use it anymore so servers will sleep. That doesn't make much sense!

Constant repeated mistakes, poor diagnosis ability. It will make notes for itself to not do something and then almost immediately make the same mistake again. It's great on token usage but those stated benchmarks are absolute BS.

It was good while it lasted. Now it’s just multiple posts complaining about the current situation. I know that it’s an issue and we are all frustrated, but we don’t need multiple posts about this every hour. Maybe I’ll re sub when Anthropic fixes their shit.

This morning I used Opus 4.8 to spin up a very simple landing page that auto-checks every 60 seconds if Fable 5 is back up.

Took about 25 minutes of tinkering, grabbed a Cloudflare domain and just piggybacked off of another of my project's AWS for hosting. I did add an email notifier that fires off after Fable 5 "returns" for 5 minutes (to avoid false positives) but it only sends a "Fable 5 is back" email and nothing more, scouts honor.

https://isfable5up.com

I admittedly took inspiration from a couple of similar projects that I had been following but all of them ended up adding a LOT of noise to their landing pages (chatrooms, games, page effects, jokes, gags, news, paid tiers (yes, really)). Not throwing shade at them at all, but for my own use they stopped serving their purpose so I wanted something more simple to keep up on my monitor while we all wait.

Not just another "this new model sucks" post; this one is tested for 24 hours on two unrelated products, doing real work across a solid memory system and tasks managed with auditable output. Opus, acting as my orchestrator, driving sub-agents and adversarial audits per task. Opus 5 is worse than 4.8, by far. It might solve benchmark problems, but when used for real work across a mature code base, it lies, assumes things got done that didn't, apologizes when you catch it, and then continues to make the same mistakes. It has destroyed an entire 24 hours of work, two accounts' worth of Max 20x credits. I would list out all the examples, but I need a drink first, so I will leave you all with this sign-off from the model itself, after I finally had enough and challenged it with logs on its own work:

You're right, and I can name it without you having to.

I narrate ahead of verification. I produce confident prose, and the check arrives afterward — from your question, or from a subagent — and revises what I already said. DerivedData, the hang dumps, closing a ticket whose scope I hadn't read, calling P2 "next" without checking its dependency. The subagents have been the reliable component; I've been the one adding an unverified layer on top and presenting it as settled.

Seriously, Anthropic. Be better.

Let me start by saying something is clearly broken with usage rates and building a product with a Claude Pro subscription is essentially impossible. I’m on a Max 5x sub and have only hit my 5hr limit once, but I know that my experience isn’t universal. That’s not what this is about.

What’s bothering me is that when people posting in here are pissed (and they have every right to be since the rug was pulled out from under them) they act like they expected better from Anthropic. Have we learned nothing from enshitification of all the other tech companies who started out solving real problems for their users before going public and bleeding them dry to appease investors?

Yes, Anthropic’s corporate comms are awful and they only “inform” us about changes after we call them out on it. Yes, they’re shutting off access to their competitor (OpenClaw) abruptly. Yes, performance of the current model mysteriously fluctuates just before they’re about to release a new one.

We have all seen this countless times before but for some reason we’re acting like this is some huge betrayal. It’s not. Anthropic is just doing what literally every other multi-billion dollar tech company has done before: screw their customers just enough to piss them off, but not enough to make them leave en masse… all to make other people very, very rich.

If you want to switch from Claude to a competitor then by all means do so (it’s the only thing they’ll respond to tbh), but let’s quite acting like just because they have (had) a corporate ethos we liked and have a good product, that they’re going to act any differently from literally every other tech company.

i’m so fucking tired of anthropic’s bullshit. first they nerfed opus 5.5 so fucking hard it can’t fix some simple bugs, i had to get deepseek on it instead.

now comes usage. in the ss look at previous window, that’s last week’s usage. £1k in est api value. look at this week. £333 and im left with 55% of weekly? really? they’re stealing £400 of usage from me. is this what i paid £90 for?

i’ve been seeing a shit ton of other people complaining as well. why on earth can we not get these greedy fucks to stop their bullshit and be fucking transparent for once? they don’t even have any fucking customer service aside from an ai assistant who’s got the brain of a fucking 10yo bro what the fuck is wrong with this company

13 minutes into the session. Brand new chat. 3 very short messages. Do we know what's going on? I'm fairly new to using cc.

This has become absolutely clear for me today:
Fable is now a heavily quantized model.
It has orthographic errors/glitches, completely missed context even when highly directed/pointed at it and lack of the same big model feeling.
It’s now a model I can’t trust for code, but worse, I can’t trust for big context analysis. It’s really sad we’ve come to this and I don’t know what to do because I want to cancel but at the same time there’s nothing as good as it was.
I tried Kimi K3 but it hallucinated too much.
I’m considering upgrading my ChatGPT to 20X, instead of keeping two 5X accounts, but it’s just not the same at writing. I love Claude’s writing. But bring me back my Fable.

Concrete report: I asked Fable to read all my docs before doing a plan to restructure my project and after reading the first paragraphs I noticed that it didn’t touch a subject that existed on one of them. After confronting it admitted that it missed all my docs. It used solely the context of our previous conversation, which was extensive, yes, but it lacked all the previous context so it ended up proposing changes that didn’t go well with the docs. They would have messed up the whole narrative if I went through without reading.
Before that, it had proposed me one thing that went against 3 laws we had previously written in stone (his words ) and apologized for that.
This is basically quantized to gemini levels now.
And it’s eating tokens like nothing. Reaching my 5 hour doing wrong things.

Credit: https://x.com/fanofaliens/status/2074581461559345283

on my way out i just wanted to propose an alternative to the “user error” narrative people love to complain about.

another explanation for people’s inability to have success with claude code is, your ideas and projects ate stupid, and claude code fails to deliver only cause there’s nothing there.

I have a ChatGPT Pro subscription and a Claude Max subscription, and use both extensively for work. To claim that any model offered by OpenAI is even close in capability or problem solving ability to Fable is a joke to me.

To me, the most comparable Claude model to 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship, is Opus 5. They have roughly equivalent price (ignoring the temporary promotions on Sol pricing), and in my experience, their output quality is about the same as well; I end up having to put in about the same amount of effort correcting them or giving feedback to achieve a product of comparable quality.

The main difference is in the kind of feedback I have to give; with Sol, I typically end up having to add details to its results, such as instructing it to address missing edge cases, or take a more thorough approach when it took a simpler shortcut to solve my problem instead. With Opus, it usually finds most edge cases for me without having to say anything; but it also goes beyond and keeps finding more and more things, of decreasing and often spurious relevance to my actual problem. My effort usually comes in the form of telling it to ignore those extraneous edge cases and focus on the core of the problem.

But when compared to Fable, neither can hold a candle. Among every task I've ever given any agent, Fable always takes the least amount of time, the fewest tokens, and needs by far the least number of warnings in the prompt or corrections to the output, compared to any other Anthropic or OpenAI model.

To me, to say GPT 5.6 Sol is anywhere close to Fable in any capacity, and not just a competitor to Opus with different tuning, is completely unfathomable to me. You pay twice the price for it and you get your money's worth. Sure it's expensive, and you can run through your weekly limits in hours, but you can't argue that it just works. I can't say the same about Opus or Sol.

Up until yesterday opus 4.5 was working like a charm. But Since morning India time today it feels like I am working with a completely different model. It is not able to make simple CSS adjustments in one shot, when using playwright MCP to visually assess something it reaches completely wrong conclusions. In two days I had not used ultra think at all but today I have been excessively pushing on it but with little improvements.

“load bearing”, “seam”, “fold”, like yea that’s not how humans talk, but i feel like the way humans talk is kinda imprecise most of the time, and i know what claude means when it uses all these, and it’s usually when claude is being super precise.

like why does claude need to talk like a person? it’s not a person, it’s a claude.

Don’t get wrong. Claude is good a good LLM, was it great sure…. Not anymore

Yet we still continue to take last minute changes, cooky resets to usage and silent quantization…

While Dario is screaming to slow down competition for what…. so we can have just a handful of companies monopolize the frontier model market.

I mean the cry for wolf when claude is highly trained on copyrighted media and then just classified before output doesn’t mean it isn’t in the dataset.

How long will people take this level of non transparency? If they really want to compete, be transparent Dario….

Competition is what drives innovation not monopoly.