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They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus
by bentt 24d ago
They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.
But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.
So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.
Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.
Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.
- GPerson 24d agoFable is still on the $100 plan for me. (Maybe this is A/B testing or something.)
- rafaelmn 24d agoMight as well not be - I routinely get rate limited in a single review session. I've honestly stopped using CC and moved to codex. Sol has it's warts but I've never once hit limits on a 100€ and I get a similar level of performance for what I'm doing. I wouldn't mind bumping Fable to 200$ plan if it was actually better but between the insane caps, reverting to opus/sonnet randomly and having similar perf as OAI - I'm done with it. Next step is to put 100$ into open router and try some western hosted open models with Pi when OAI starts pulling up prices.
- alasdair_ 24d agoYou can turn off the reverting to opus with an option.
- rafaelmn 24d agoI did not know that - but what happens then I get denied and I plead with the model that my usecase doesn't violate its TOS ? Edit prompt till I get it to pass ? Reverting is annoying but being flagged for security questions while I'm doing code review is insane.
- chrisgarand 24d agoYes, you get to re-try it until it might pass. Each attempt uses tokens at Fable level though. I once burned through a 4 hour window ($20 plan) in 4 attempts to re-frame the request. You want to disable "Switch models when a message is flagged"[1] [1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16049681-why-claude-switched-models-in-your-conversation-with-opus-5 https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16049681-why-claude-s...
- almog 24d agoWhat do you mean by "review session"?
- rafaelmn 24d agoJust started reviewing a feature PR and it would hit the 4 hour limit on max effort. On high as soon as I do some clarification turns it would also hit the limit.
- giancarlostoro 24d agoI still havent used it much, and they crippled Opus for what feels like no reason. Some suspect that Opus knowing theres a better model degrades it some. Shame.
- bryan0 24d agoYeah for me Fable works great on the $100 plan. The problem with Fable is you will hit the weekly limit. The $200 plan does not give you 4x or even 2x the weekly limit. For me i only get about 1.3x weekly quota, so I don’t think it’s worth it.
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- ikidd 24d agoAnd they've hobble Fable and Opus so hard with their safety guardrails, I ask innocuous questions and tasks and they get flagged so often I gave up on it. I can get all the work I need done in GPT5.5 or 5.6 without the hassle. I just kept a $20 plan going for use on my phone.
- ericol 24d agoI had Fable bail on me because I used the word autopilot on a project. Changed to something unrelated, and off we went.
- dwaltrip 24d agoI haven’t hit the Fable guardrails a single time after substantial usage. And I’m working on a ML project (a game AI). I don’t doubt people are hitting it… shrugs
- brookst 24d agoYeah same. Multiple 20x max accounts, I typically hit > 50% of the fable usage limit on eace, literally never seen a guardrail. Maybe I’m boring? Maybe they have some kind of account reputation system?
- adastra22 24d agoBe careful, this is against ToS and they bill ban you.
- hakanderyal 24d agoIt's not, at least for now. Various staff members have confirmed this.
- adastra22 24d agoSeparate accounts for work and personal projects is ok. Using multiple accounts to bypass usage limits for the same project is explicitly against ToS. One of Anthropic’s problems though is that the legalese will say one thing, while key employees say something totally different on HN or X. At the end of the day the lawyers always win.
- varispeed 24d ago[dead]
- bitexploder 24d agoI kind of still chill out on Opus 4.6 too. 4.8 is good too. I go between them. Opus 4.8 is a little smarter some of the time. Their use of language is both very different from Opus 5. Some of the time I have a hard time believing Opus 5 is even related to Opus 4.6 and 4.8.
- Retr0id 24d agoI'm going to be sad when they retire 4.6. It's not my daily driver but it's still my go-to when the other models are being stupid in one way or another (either being too verbose, or lecturing me about how what I'm asking for is evil and bad).
- Melonai 24d agoHah! I was so surprised to get that "lecturing" behavior from Opus 5 too, I didn't know it was more common.
- pertymcpert 24d agoI tested all recent Opus versions and 4.6 and 4.7 were both fine FWIW. Seems 4.8 is when something started to go wrong.
- bitexploder 24d agoThat seems about right. 4.8 is like in between 4.6 and 5 in terms of capability and language and they are all pretty close honestly. I just default to using Opus 5 for a coding agent that I don't interact with and I like driving with Opus 4.6 or Fable. Fable thinks too much though. Fable is like that engineer on your team that will over-engineer the shit out of something if you let them. Fable was like, "Here are 34 yaks, which shall we shave first <hands rubbing together>" and I was like can't we just... write the script first and then decide of any of these poor yaks need shaving?
- perching_aix 24d agoCan you give an example? It's a bit entertaining to read this given all the years long (and still ongoing) posturing about LLM sycophancy (not that all of these couldn't be true at the same time).
- Retr0id 24d ago> The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates. Where can I find these stats?
- bryan0 24d agoThe article has a chart with this data. They credit “Ramp AI index”. The chart’s a bit confusing though, like what are the units of the y-axis?
- somenameforme 24d agoAlso on a dark reader? It says at the bottom, but gets dimmed out pretty seriously with dark reading. It's a 7 day average business spend, relative to June 1st (2025 presumably) indexed at 100.
- bentt 24d agoThe other thing I forgot to mention about Opus 5 is that at least out of the gate, it seemed very intent on spinning up agents and obliterating my token budget. It was noticeably more token hungry than 4.8. It would make sense for them to intend this behavior.
- somenameforme 24d agoThis is likely because of your thinking level. The difference between max and ultracode is primarily that the latter is max with a bunch of agents.
- bentt 24d agoDid they change the default perhaps? I didn't touch anything with thinking level in that time.
- benjiro29 24d ago*This is likely because of your thinking level. The difference between max and ultracode is primarily that the latter is max with a bunch of agents.* I do not know why people even use Max or Ultra levels of thinking effort. Most of the time, i found its better to just run any of the frontier level models, with high or medium. Their capability beyond those levels is often diminishing returns, in exchange for double or quadrupling the costs (or usage). And the bonus is that often at those levels, they tend to spin up less sub-agents that just eat away at tokens/usage, like its water in the desert. A Max or Ultra is something that really only belongs if medium or high can not solve a very nasty bug or issue. Even in planning its often too much.
- nottorp 24d agoI'm using company Claude for work with no choice what provider I use. I did a quickie test with Fable when they were OMG TRY IT NOW, didn't see much of a difference from Opus 4.8. Except i ran into one of their stupid security guardrails. Yes I'm doing security on the software my employer owns, silly. Then I didn't notice the US unbanned Fable after banning it, or that they extended the "trial" Fable period where it worked on fixed price plans. Not in time to bother trying again. After that Opus 5 showed up. Language changed, okay, I don't care much. However it seems to create busywork for itself. Spawning subagents on tasks that don't do that with 4.8. Overall taking longer. So I'm back on pinned 4.8 and doing actual work. Main problem - for Anthropic - is it's good enough.
- electroglyph 24d agoOpus 5 literally benchmarks higher than Fable
- empath75 24d agoThis whole article seems sort of based on a misunderstanding. Anthropic is _actively discouraging_ people from using Fable at this point. It's not a failure, they're steering people to Opus 5 intentionally.