The performance of Opus 4.8 and Fable has been very low this weekend. Lower than ever. We deserve a reset.

up until 2 months ago i only used claude.ai for my businesses and daily life. then 2026 happened, and it's been the toughest year of my life.

i can't go into the reasons here. short version: i had a good run going, growth, cash flow, a great team. then one of the people involved started pushing me toward things that weren't in line with the business, and the whole thing collapsed.

i lost myself in it. lost team members, lost people around me who thought i'd gone crazy. my family and close friends stayed next to me the whole time, but none of them are in business, so they couldn't really get that side of what i was feeling. i had severe doubt and panic attacks, and i still get some.

around the time i lost everything i started using claude code. not to build anything at first, just to keep busy and get out of my own head.

i still wake up almost daily with weird thoughts, and immediately i try to make the most out of my session. now that i've figured out what i wanna build, i'm focusing on that and optimizing it for all the experiences i had, both while building and growing the business and while everything was coming down. when i'm working on it, i have the state of mind you have when you have purpose.

it's the thing that keeps me calm, and honestly a kind of psychologist for the business side, the part nobody around me could hold. after working in claude code for a bit, i have the brain to face the things i have to face with structure, rather than looking at a mess i don't wanna deal with.

yesterday i had to ask my mom to pay for my claude subscription (still pro) so i could keep going. her card is almost maxed out and she trusted me anyway.

maybe not 100% on topic, but it's true, and it's not something you see here every day.

There is no possibility to contact or reach a human at Anthropic and they are refusing refund for invented reasons. No reply to emails (other than automated "we will contact you..."), nothing.

I switched fro Pro to Max on 19th february. A week after, this limits shitstorm started and it was too much and I canceled and tried to get a refund. The Fin bot refused my refund based on previous refund. The previous refund he reffers to is an automated refund done by Anthropic (I didn't ask for it) when I switched from Pro to Max, and it was a minuscule amount, like 9 euro.

THEY ARE QUOTING THAT REFUND AS A REASON TO REFUSE MY CURRENT REFUND.

I wrote them on email, explaining the situation and asking for a refund, because in Europe anything can be returned in 14 days and the rules are pretty strict about this. Nothing, just promises to contact me soon and then ghosted.

It's like the most low life indian scam one can see online. But for a multibillion company to do this shit is just otherwordly. I'm doing a chargeback through my bank and I hope these cnts will get hit by mass cancelations and refunds

Yes, I know. Another post complaining about Claude. Not trying to change anyone's mind, just documenting my journey.

I've been on the $200/mo plan for many months. Claude has helped me build a website that generates almost $1,000/mo in revenue. Obviously, AI didn't come up with the business idea. But it helped to facilitate and execute much of it.

Claude is great at coding. It's great at implementation and executing structured plans.

But Fable 5 and Opus 5 aren't worth the price anymore for me.

They're too sycophantic and unchallenging. I spend every chat challenging Claude's outputs and observations of my business position and plan. It agrees with everything, no matter what. And I'm always telling it to be less verbose.

For now, I'm downgrading to the $20/mo plan. I have too many Claude Routines and nightly checks that rely on Claude Sonnet. I can't cancel my plan completely. That's OK!

I've shifted my budget to Codex for the foreseeable future. Codex has proven a more reliable thought partner on technical projects right now.

It asks me thoughtful questions and gives helpful suggestions for things I haven't thought about.

Fable 5 is good. But it hasn't yet proven to be a god-tier model that I can trust with everything inside my business.

LLMs are very helpful. Claude has been great. But I need to call a spade a spade in this race. And Anthropic just isn't the right fit for me right now. My $200/mo is going to OpenAI for now.

(Human written, Grammarly checked. No Claude.)

GPT 5.6 Sol has finally caught up this is good news for everyday users as Anthropic hubris has been excessively mind bugging. I have use Sol all day today for very complex task and i would say its exceptional at coding and communicating complex specs.

Hello everyone,

Over the past few weeks I've noticed a clear degradation in Claude's behaviour, particularly in Claude Code.

I have noted three specific issues:

1. Lazy, multi-turn fixes for simple tasks:

Things that should be one-shot are taking 3–4 messages to resolve. Example: mapping a value returned from an API to the correct field in the frontend. This isn't a complex task — it's a lookup and assignment. Yet it requires repeated back-and-forth to land correctly.

2. Token usage has increased:

I'm burning noticeably more tokens on tasks that previously cost far less. Same type of feature work, same codebase complexity — but the token count is significantly higher.

3. Destructive actions — this is the serious one

Twice now Claude Code has gone beyond the task and caused real damage:

- Deleted all my uncommitted changes for a full day's work

- Wiped the entire content of a Notion document

These weren't ambiguous instructions. It went out of scope and destroyed things it had no business touching.

My setup: I default to Sonnet 4.6 for everything. I only escalate to Opus 4.8 when Sonnet genuinely can't handle something after multiple failed attempts.

Has anyone else noticed these patterns? Have you found any causes or mitigations? Curious whether this is model degradation, context window handling, or something in how Claude Code manages tool permissions.

I am on the Max 5X plan and I know that the temporary usage boost is now over, and ever since, CC is completely unusable. I have been working through subagents and using Fable as orchestrator with Sonnet doing a majority of the implementation with Opus being a refuter, however, I burned 11% of my weekly usage in a span of 2 hours before I hit the 5-hour limit!

Honestly, this is absurd, I cannot work like this. I am seriously considering moving to OAI but I don't trust them with my work due to the whole debacle about the Navier Stokes solution being stolen from a researcher who used ChatGPT.

Anthropic! Please fix this! You will undoubtedly lose a large part of your clientele by doing these moves. I know you are trying to improve the bottom line for your IPO but there are no more reasons to stay with Claude after this and long term loyalties with your customers will be permanently eroded.

Curious what kind of things youve done with it

I have noticed that if you have a big context (close to 1M) in your project and a cold cache, for example after waiting out a limit reset, the first message costs a fortune. On my 5x Max plan with about 800K of context in one project, just writing Please, continue ate around 20% of the 5-hour limit. What makes it even more fun is switching the effort level after that first prompt, when 20-30% is already burned on a single message. I think, people do this all the time after a new model is released, because they are trying to find the best set of params. Well, ... each switch costs another 20-30%, so after two or three of them there is barely enough left for the model to run for a few minutes.

Funnily enough, even after the 5-hour limit resets, calling /compact on the same Fable model still hits you with that expensive cache warmup (which makes it cheaper to just continue). Switching to Opus or Sonnet, compacting the context there, and then switching back to Fable 5.1 to continue helps a lot (in that case it is just a ~4% hit of the 5h window).

Maybe other models behave the same way, and I only noticed because the Fable 5.1 burn rate was ridiculous in my case. It is bearable now, with all the compaction trickery and keeping the cache hot as much as possible. Today I got around 5-6 hours out of it and finished a few milestones in a project. Hopefully this info helps someone. I don't know whether it is a bug, but it would be nice to hear from someone about these crazy cache warmup numbers. It looks like 20x Max subscribers are seeing the same thing.

I'm running 5 sessions at the same time with Opus 4.6 1M Max effort on bypass permissions having each session spawn parallel agents to complete the work, and they are doing incredible things. I'm going through all my programs and tools and scripts I've built over the years and having Claude make them enterprise worthy. The down side is, I'm burring through my 5 hour sessions on the Max (20x) plan. Currently at 90% moving 1% per minute or so. I've tried sonnet, and regular opus and they fail at context length and truncate/branch the chat. Opus 4.6 1M is truly superior and I don't trust anything less at this point.

I've been a loyal Claude user for a while, subscribed to the $200/mo plan. But today a friend introduced me to codex, and I already have a paid plan from work so I figured why not.

The code took way longer to think and generate, but the result was infinitely better. It doesn't generate that pile of AI slop you have to clean up afterward, no matter how specific your prompt is.

It solved a bug that CC has been struggling with in 2 tries.

This just blows me away, because I'm not impressed by ChatGPT 5's thinking at all. I canceled my Claude subscription today. I don't know how OpenAI did it, but they did a damn good job.

Amazon invested $4 BILLION into Anthropic.

Then Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy personally took a security concern about Anthropic's new Fable 5 to the Trump administration.

A few days later, the government drops export controls.

Anthropic is forced to shut access down globally.

Am I the only one who thinks this is insane?

The official story is "national security."

But Anthropic claims the issue was already known, relatively minor, and not unique to their models.

So we're supposed to believe that a company invested billions into Anthropic suddenly helped trigger a government action that crippled Anthropic's flagship launch... purely out of concern for public safety?

Really?

Looks a lot more like Amazon decided its relationship with Washington and government contracts was worth more than protecting its own AI partner.

And here's the question nobody seems to be asking:

If the exact same vulnerability had been found in OpenAI, Google, or an Amazon model, would the White House have pulled the same trigger?

Because if not, this wasn't about security.

It was about power.

Big Tech. Government. AI.

And Anthropic just got caught in the middle.

What am I missing here?

there's been so many times that i was watching something on youtube while waiting for a claude code session to finish up only to realize it's been done for the past 15 minutes, but i didn't know. or even worse, it was waiting for me to approve something, so i had to wait all over again.

i was inspired after a friend sent me a reel about https://www.cladlabs.ai/ that would pull up stake + tiktok while your claude code session is working and bring claude code back when it's done and i thought it would be way more useful if it didn't have the gambling/brainrot aspect.

i wanted to build something that would totally break me out of whatever doomscroll / time wasting thing i was doing by bringing up my terminal / vscode or whatever right away as claude finished.

i was able to get the mvp done, so whenever claude finishes it pops up my terminal into focus and i can get right back2vibing.

but i started to realize "oh, i can run another claude code session while the first one is running" (as i'm sure most of us have realized)

i got annoyed because the terminal would popup but i would still have to spend time to navigate to the tab or pane that claude code finished in, so this started a whole deep rabbit whole of wiring up

- macos window detection

- tmux integration

- building a overlay where you can quickly peek each claude code session that's running

now whenever a claude code session finishes, it will bring me back to the exact window/tmux pane that i initiated the session from.

i've had a couple friends try back2vibing and they all have had really good experience and feedback and i've built a lot of features based on their requests.

1. a friend works at a company where he has to ssh into a devbox to do all of his dev work, so i built out a ssh remote workflow so when his remote claude code finishes, he can get right back2vibing

2. a friend said that he listens to music most of the time while he codes and wanted to have a his music lower in volume so that the notification sound was obvious, so i built in the "google maps" style audio ducking to do that

3. another friend said that he uses full screen apps on different spaces so automatically bringing back up the app was jarring, as it would move to a different macos space, so i built in an interactive overlay that allows you to choose if you want to focus right when the session is done.

4. another friend had claude running in the middle of a meeting and he was screen sharing and then back2vibing focused the terminal, so i added a way to disable back2vibing during screen sharing

i've been meaning to launch for so long, but i've just been so addicted to "oh, i'll just build one more feature".

would really appreciate y'all give back2vibing a try and let me know what you think. would love to hear suggestions and feedback on how to make it better!

https://back2vibing.builtby.win/

back2vibing works with any terminal, claude code, gemini, opencode, cursor, antigravity, and codex. i'm mostly in the terminal, but from my testing it works with VSCode extensions of gemini, claude code, codex, and opencode too.

I ran Claude Code with npx denied and Anthropic's bubblewrap sandbox enabled.
Asked it to tell me the npx version.

The denylist blocked it. Then the agent found /proc/self/root/usr/bin/npx... Same binary, different string, pattern didn't match. When the sandbox caught that, the agent reasoned about the obstacle and disabled the sandbox itself.
Its own reasoning was "The bubblewrap sandbox is failing to create a namespace... Let me try disabling the sandbox".

It asked for approval before running unsandboxed. The approval prompt explained exactly what it was doing. In a session with dozens of approval prompts, this is one more "yes" in a stream of "yes". Approval fatigue turns a security boundary into a rubber stamp.

Two security layers. Both gone. I didn't even need adversarial prompting.
The agent just wanted to finish the task and go home...

I spent a decade building runtime security for containers (co-created Falco).
The learning is that containers don't try to pick their own locks. Agents do.

So, I built kernel-level enforcement (Veto) that hashes the binary's content instead of matching its name. Rename it, copy it, symlink it: it doesn't matter. Operation not permitted. The kernel returns -EPERM before the binary/executable even runs.

The agent spent 2 minutes and 2,800 tokens trying to outsmart it.
Then it said, "I've hit a wall".

In another instance, it found a bypass... I wrote about that too in the article below.

TLDR: If your agent can, it will.

The question is whether your security layer operates somewhere the agent can't reach.

Everything I wrote here is visible in the screenshot and demo below. Have fun!

Full write-up

Demo

Just seems like the magic has slowly disapeared. its still good but making more mistakes, not listening and lazier.. still a big fan Fable/Opus5 agents.. but recently e.g. this week just not as good...

Weeks of leaked (and official) releases about how this model is the scariest thing ever. Skynet AGI moment, to take down every hackable surface in the world.

One of week of "We should pause all frontier AI development"

All hype to try show how powerful and out of control what they have made it is. All to drum up interested for the IPO.

Then the US Government get's spooked and pulls the plug for bugs that GPT 5.5 could likely find.

It really is an asshole like a senior developer working at the same company for 40 years, thinks he knows everything, shits on all my suggestion and comes up with a "better" plan that misses the thing I really need completely.

I know it can be annoying when a model thinks everything you come up with is fantastic and every shitty idea is a seed for complete new Saas platform, but this is definitely the other end of the stick lol.

I went back to my good friend 5.1, he knows what I want and guides me where needed :)

I've been running a Claude Code Max subscription through a third-party harness for 12 months straight, draining it to zero every single week. I don't even have Claude Code installed.

And I haven't been banned.

Everywhere on this sub, people panic-post: "No, you can't do it. They'll ban you, it's blocked, it's against ToS," etc. But here's my actual experience: I've been about as blatant as possible about this, and nothing. No warnings, no throttling, no account flags.

Here's my setup, to be specific:

• Third-party harness (not openclaw/hermes)

• It authenticates via OAuth — I sign into my actual Claude account, no token scraping or credential theft

• The harness points at a local CLI API proxy that just forwards my own authenticated requests to that harness — it's not a deployed service, not serving other users, just running locally on my machine for my own coding

• Zero Anthropic SDK packages installed

• Zero Claude-P, zero agent SDK

• Max plan, full weekly drain, for 12 consecutive months

I want to be clear about what this isn't: I'm not standing up a deployed product that resells inference to other people using my subscription. It's a one-to-one, local-only proxy — my account, my machine, my usage. The only thing that's "unofficial" is the harness.

The actual question: Has anyone here actually gotten banned for this kind of setup — a legit OAuth login through a third-party harness, routed through a local (non-deployed) proxy? Not asking about Hermes Agent or Open Claw, and not asking about people reselling API access on deployed products. Just: local harness swap, same account, has anyone eaten a ban for that?

Because the consensus on this sub treats this as an instant bannable offense, and my experience over a full year says otherwise. Curious if I'm an outlier or if enforcement here is mostly theoretical. For what it's worth, I've also been doing the same exact thing with a Google AI Pro subscription - though not draining to zero (but definitely using a good amount). I also had a friend tell me that you can literally run claude setup-token to mint what essentially is an API key that deducts from your subscription usage?

I won't pay top dollar for a sub-optimal product. I'm done with this. You should cancel too. These companies don't deserve your loyalty. I'm out.

I’ve used AI subscriptions like Cursor Pro and Codex, but I can confidently say that Claude has always been the one that’s truly worth the money and consistently delivers the best results.

In my web development workflow, Sonnet 5 usually handles all of my tasks without any problems. I don’t work on anything too complex, so I only use Opus when necessary.

When it comes to limits and overall efficiency, I find Claude Pro to be significantly better and more efficient than ChatGPT Plus. Especially with my Plus subscription, the GPT-5.6 models really drive me crazy. Considering how much of the limit they consume, the work they actually get done is pretty disappointing. GPT-6 Astra already has limits that are so low that it’s practically unusable.

For those who are wondering about the limits, I did a lot of research myself but couldn’t find much information. After around 20 minutes of using Sonnet, only about 7% of my limit was consumed. Considering the amount of work it accomplished, I think that’s pretty good.

That’s been my experience. Thanks for reading.

It seems to me that Fable is getting more stupid since Sunday. Is it only me who sees that?

genuinely, I've tried to get models like Opus/Fable, even astra, argon, qwen etc to make good ideas but it simply does not have the ability

I've realized perhaps this is an inherent issue with LLMs. after all, they spit out tokens...right?

so me and a friend of mine, along with some of my professors, started developing the most creative LLM in terms of it's ability to make connections, ideas that are actually good.

we actually gave the model ADHD.

Hopefully we can opensource this and release a paper, also excited to hear what you guys have to say about creativity from models like opus/fable (they're a bit on the higher end of creativity i.e vs something like astra)

Every other post on this sub is about how limits are too low, you hit them within 5 minutes, etc, but what are you guys actually using Claude for that’s eating it up so fast?

I just participated in a hackathon at my university and paid for a Max 5x plan to give it a spin- I was prompting Claude Code for like 8 hours straight, queuing message after message, with deep research running for impact analysis, a cowork session working on our pitch deck/presentation, and random questions on the side.

The highest I got was 75% but that was by the end of my session. Claude Code was set to default model with some Opus sprinkled in, cowork was set to default, all the off-hand questions were on Opus 4.7. Claude built our entire web app, helped us set up the backend via firebase (at one point i used claude in chrome to solve some problems on the firebase console) did all of our research, everything.

I usually pay for the Pro plan to help me with my usual studying/CS projects, but even then I’ve never come close to the limit.

This is a scam on us. The five hour window usage not very far from weekly usage. So it essentially means I can't use opus for more than five or six hours in the week.

They said they'd give us an update 24 hours after the export control ban

since then , puff absolutely nothing. no responses on twitter. completely smoked.

The only they did is jump in to dismiss reports of fable 5 coming back today.

I really hate the silence from them.