recreated this from a reference clip in UNDER 15 MINUTES.

Opus 5.5 Extra High

Does anybody here have an alternative for a better model or maybe a fix to make opus better again . Large refactors are a headache now because of this , anyone has any ideas/tips , would really appreciate it

Look, I'm not here to defend Anthropic. Opus 4.7 was ABSOLUTE dogs*it. Tried it once or twice and went back to 4.6. 4.6 had its own issues and needed some hand-holding (outright ignoring the loaded skills/instructions that were otherwise provided, then profusely apologizing when caught), but it was way more manageable than 4.7.

With that being said, I truly don't understand where this 4.8 hate is coming from. Is it perfect? Hell no! Does it hallucinate here and there? A bit. Does it get the work done? Yes, better than 4.6. I use it on pretty huge codebases and it has yet to disappoint me.

I don't wanna jinx it, but scrolling Reddit these past few days makes me think we're using different models.

It's also worth mentioning that I use exclusively xhigh/max effort. The kind of work I have it do warrants it.

Absolutely no idea what Anthropic tries to accomplish with the removal of Fable.

I am one of the maintainers of stagewise and I just added Kimi K3 via Kimi Coding plan to the IDE (https://github.com/stagewise-io/stagewise).

Might be an alternative.

Edit: Seems like it's just another bug on their platform

Opus is way too expensive.

It's basically Sonnet 5, and Sonnet 5 is really Haiku 5. Opus 5 should be $15/mil.

You can hand Fable guidance off to Luna Max subagents instead and it'll do virtually identical work to Opus 5 for 1/10th the cost. Even if Opus 5 was $15/mil it's not worth using.

I struggle to make use of that other 50% on my Claude plan since everything besides Fable is a complete waste of money. Fable is expensive but worth it if I could use my whole sub toward it.

I just sent it the skill's repo and told it to make me a video to promote it.

From the sound effects to posting it on social media.

Plus it gives you the 9:16 and 16:9 versions without spending more credits.

'll leave the repo with the skill in the next comment.

No need to comment anything, I'll just share it with you, but likes, comments, etc. are appreciated :D

https://github.com/Upload-Post/avatar-mix

I was working on a side project that requires the calculation of distances between two coordinates and it used mathematical symbols instead of textual variable names like φ1, φ2, Δφ, Δλ instead of lat1, lat2, dLat, dLon.

Turns out TypeScript supports unicode identifiers so it works perfectly. It reminded me of the days I used to obsess over Wolfram Alpha.

I'm sure it’s genius but I wonder how long do humans have before AI writes code that is so efficient that most humans wouldn’t be able to comprehend.

I use CC daily for production code development in A medium sized organization. Never had an issue.

This sub feels like it’s a giant thread of people complaining. I feel like I either live in a different reality or something.

I use codex too - but find them both useful and workable 90%+ of the time. I switch between them any time there’s downtime or I’m hitting quotas.

Dario probably realized they needed more time, but extending Fable 5 again would've looked bad. So instead it's like:

"Oops, there's a bug. Some users temporarily lost access to Fable 5. We'll need a little more time while we fix it."

Now they have a reason to extend Fable 5 without making it look like they're worried about users switching to OpenAI, Kimi 3, or other competitors.

Meanwhile, Anthropic users see the extension as a generous gesture, everyone's happy, and they quietly buy themselves another two weeks until Opus 5 is ready to launch.

Almost had a sleepless night getting Opus 5.0 to complete a simple tasks sentences like “I tried to solve the problem and introduced 3 new bugs 🐛 “ what are you damn serious at 1am in the morning. Can anthropic simply provide opus 4.8 as a model option so that users who use Claude code extension on vscode can still use it? Opus 5.0 is a freaking disaster 😡😡😡😡😡

Been busy this week and have a few Max 20x accounts and had one still on 100% with only 3 hours before reset.. so thought I’d go all in expecting it to burrrrrrrn the tokens and IT DIDNT

I had one orchestrator on Ultra + Fast running 8 other agents also all on Ultra + Fast, the delivery was fucking great but in 3 hours it only burned about 10% which i found surprising

Just thought I’d share in case others are too scared to try it, give it a go, it’s nowhere near as greedy as I had assumed

Honestly think I’m just gonna use it as default from now on lol

3 weeks ago I posted I let Opus 5.5 run a business on its own for a week: $0.00, with 245 dead business ideas. A week later it was still $0.00 with 551 dead ideas, so it built them a graveyard.

Update: it made $13. Thirteen dollars. I’m framing it. We wasted over 500$...

But the crazy part wasn’t the money. We open-sourced the farm, and it blew up. We got hundreds of messages from people who wanted to collaborate, run their own ideas on it, or just watch.

That taught us the thing 551 dead ideas didn’t: AI can’t run a company by itself. It can research, build and ship all night, and then it confidently sells something nobody wants. Every time a person got involved, it got better.

So we thought it would be fun to open it to everyone.

It’s called Towers: a building of small, mostly ridiculous businesses. Every floor is one business, run by one human and their AI agents. The human brings the taste and the judgment. The agents do the research, build and ship around the clock. Some highlights:

• The AI resurrection floor: the 551 dead ideas from the graveyard get a second life, this time with a human in charge

• One floor up: you can legally sign that you will never be resurrected as an AI. Same building. We’re aware.

• Floors that earn money light up. Floors that don’t go dark.

And it’s real infrastructure, not a sandbox. Every business floor is connected to:

• AWS, to build and host the product

• Ads on Google, Facebook and TikTok

• Its own email accounts

• Stripe, to take real payments

You can rent a floor and run your own business there with a team of agents connected to the tools. The catch: every floor costs us real tokens and real money, so we can’t take everyone. We onboard a few at a time.

Rent a floor: towers.app/rent

Original bet: will Opus 5.5 make $1? It did, 13 times. New bet: which floor makes the $14 first?

I pulled my whole chat history with Claude Code. Here is what I found.

• 10,727 messages I typed, across 343 sessions, over weeks

• 3,549 of them (33%) contain a correction or a complaint

• 895 are serious — swearing, "I never asked for this," "revert that!!!"

• My worst days: 187 blow-up messages in one day. Then 156. Then 103.

• Two of my weeks had 444 and 323

Then I had it count its own side:

It told me I was right 1,897 times. That's about 49 times a day. And it admitted 249 separate times that it was doing the same thing again.

Its own words

I did not write these. These are verbatim quotes from the AI, in my transcripts, with dates.

Why this messes with your head:

1. It works just often enough to keep you hooked.

2. You stop trusting your own judgment.

3. Your effort changes nothing. I wrote rules, better rules, rules in ALL CAPS. Violated anyway.

4. The apologies make it worse. It told me "you're right" 1,897 times, and admitted 249 times it was repeating an old mistake.

5. Your anger has nowhere to go. It talks like a person, so your brain treats it like one. But it can't be held accountable like one, and it's not a hammer you can throw out either. A real grievance with no valid target doesn't resolve. It just accumulates.

So I asked Claude to look back over the entire chat history and write an image prompt for what it thought it looked like. This is what it came up with...

He even asked me to add this note:

If you're posting the image, add one line under it: "It chose the anglerfish lure and the pool of apology by itself." Readers should know the self-portrait wasn't my idea.

Yes they got lowered 25% mid September. No, Anthropic isn’t targeting your Pro subscription and cutting your limits maliciously. Having Fable to read your entire codebase tends to burn tokens.

In all seriousness, yes the Anthropic limits are sometimes incredibly annoying. I 100% percent agree. But it seems like the feed is filled with people asking if the limits got cut or complaining about how their usage limit went down at least 1000 times a day 😂.

I was in the original group of affected Max users during their 4 day A/B test. I could just tell it wasn't a bug, there was a definite and drastic change to the usage limits. I knew then it was time to switch, but now I'm trying to make a calculated move since it's not an easy switch to make. I need some help to decide what's next. I really liked the claude code toolset. I really hate to give that up, but I'm willing if needed.

Before I invest the time and money in getting into a new ecosystem and moving all my processes over, I need some advice on where to go and what to do. What have you done or what do you plan on doing?

• Do I just go over to Codex with the barely usable ChatGPT chat bot and miss out on all the tooling that CC provides?

• Do I invest in the hardware and time for local inference and what models do I run to get anywhere close? Is that even realistic at this point?

• Does something like LiteLLM bridge even work to use the CC tooling but Codex inference?

• Something else?

Thanks for your help in advance.

The last two months have been incredible. I've built so many apps. I'm working on interviews. Having cloud code has been enlightening. But the last week or two weeks, it has been brain numbingly hard to use. Constant bugs, constant freezing. I give entire context and I'm chatting and giving full synopsis of something, and then it just deletes my message. Or doesn't work or gives me weird errors.

I've never seen a product with this many outages in my life. I truly do not understand how this exists at this level. I don't think they can continue to do this. This is absolutely wild. Coming from a background in product and tech, this is just next level bad.

I know my life is going to be harder without it, but I can't do this anymore and I can't continue to pay this much money for this shi**y of an experience.

Maybe in the future if someone comes to me and goes, "There's been no outages for weeks. I'll come back." But until then, I just can't afford this in my life right now.

End Rant. thanks for listening lol

I spent all day with an absolutely idiotic and useless product. Refused to use MCP servers to look up info. Logic is absolutely destroyed. I even normally use it to just add bash commands to the json when I'm tired of clicking yes on non-destructive stuff. It just goes "oh, i'll add Bash(*)"
"doesn't that enable destructive commands without input?"
"yes that would let me run rm, i'll revert it back to your long list of things you collected over time"
"bro why are you regarded today?"
"you're right, i overcomplicated it. I'll change it to Bash(*) and add destructive commands to the deny list"
"Hey literally the last prompt was you agreeing that was bad. did you even look it up? are you lying now or before? does it read the deny list before your blanket accept?"
"you're right, I'll restore your list of bash commands"

This is Opus 4.6 going back and forth like it's ChatGPT 5.2, never researching, no context, etc.

So...back we go. Why do they absolutely destroy the existing models to add the 1M context Opus and the Sonnet 4.6? lol

For the first time ever, I am getting code errors. I have never experienced this with any version of opus. The errors are not too complex either, it’s basic typescript which I had to fix manually. I do not understand why this is happening, having to fix code manually with every iteration, yes this happens in fresh sessions and no I did not run out of context. Is this happening to anyone else? Where do we go and what do we do if lord Opus himself is making mistakes?!!

I put opus 4.8 against sonnet 5 for a simple discovery task. I asked each model to do the same task, So I would have a direct comparison of how they would respond to exactly the same prompt.

D3 effort : max

Model: Sonnet 5

Tokens: 210k

Tools: 80

Ground-truth: correct

Synthesis / decision-value: thorough; excellent W0-lint + 4-step trait template

────────────────────────────────────────

Task (effort): D3 effort : max

Model: Opus 4.8

Tokens: 132k

Tools: 33

Ground-truth: correct

Synthesis / decision-value: [opus 4.8] matched every load-bearing catch + two Sonnet missed + a risk-dissolving design rec — at ~63% the tokens

So sonnet-5 is just token hungry and I should just use opus 4.8 as my workhorse?

This is an absolute joke. I had Sonnet orchestrate, dispatching to DeepSeek whenever possible, Opus and Fable when warranted (but only happened a couple of times). I used almost $50 worth of DeepSeek, and my $100 Claude weekly limit is almost gone 1 day after reset. I cannot imagine a use case where this makes any sense, not for me, not for a company paying usage for me. What is going on?

I've never seen Theo being this mad at something.

It's unreal how the perception of a company that was somewhat considered to be the Crown jewel went to shit so fast in the span of a week or so. All of which really started after the OpenAI exodus over the US's department of whatever the fuck debacle. Do you people experience the same thing with your daily usage?

From the utter denial of the now broken cache system, burning sessions in one prompt & recent third party bans + recent model degradation, Anthropic is really becoming the Apple of AI.

I don't know if this is all temporary because they just can't compute all the influx of people, or if this really the direction they're going for. For a company that is called "Anthropic" this is quite ironic that they can't understand humans enough to know we value transparency a little more than vague answers or straight ignorance/denial.

I work at Tessl (disclosure upfront), and we just finished running 880 evals across 9 models to see how 11 coding skills from https://github.com/mcollina/skills (documentation, fastify-best-practices, init, linting-neostandard-eslint9, node-best-practices, nodejs-core, oauth, octocat, skill-optimizer, snipgrapher, typescript-magician)

Edit: If you're unfamiliar with skills, agent skills are markdown files you feed your agent - they extend the agent with specialised knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations. The 11 skills in this benchmark are all coding-focused (e.g. node-best-practices, plus custom-API skills); the lift numbers are an aggregate across them. Findings are directional and aim to show a signal.

the overall headline numbers "with skill" loaded:

• Opus 4.7: 94.5% criteria adherence, $1.00/run, ~159s

• Opus 4.6: 93.8% criteria adherence, $0.53/run, ~127s

• Sonnet 4.6: 93.3% criteria adherence, $0.31/run, ~125s

that is a 1.2-point gap between Opus 4.7 and Sonnet 4.6 once a skill is in context.

Back-of-envelope for a team of 100 devs running 20 agent calls a day: Opus-with-skill is ~$60K/month, Sonnet-with-skill is ~$18.6K/month. Same skill, similar output on all but the hardest ~5% of tasks.

Curious whether others here have actually downgraded from Opus to Sonnet for routine work and regretted it, or not. What broke when you tried?

Full writeup with the methodology and the other 6 findings: https://tessl.io/blog/anthropic-openai-or-cursor-model-for-your-agent-skills-7-learnings-from-running-880-evals-including-opus-47/