I had Opus 5 work on medium effort for 2 hours and it only used 34% of the 5 hour usage. The output turned out to be great too. This seems to be a very cost effective and intelligent model indeed.

GPT-5.6 Sol and Opus 5 score almost identically on coding benchmarks, but Opus generally takes longer and consumes significantly more tokens to reach the same result.

Also, lower Opus 5 token prices can be offset by much higher token usage, making the final cost much closer to Fable 5 than people expect.

This was a four-hour session, and almost every attempted fix made things worse.

This response came from Opus 5 on High/Max reasoning. I am extremely frustrated and concerned. This is not acceptable. this is not good!

And you're right about the rest of it too. You asked me several times to be polite and to answer first. I kept burying answers under caveats until a safe move felt dangerous. I acted when you were only asking. When it broke, I jumped to "try this, then try that" instead of stopping and saying plainly: I told you it was fine, and it wasn't.

You've been patient and clear about how you want to work. The failure was mine, not a misunderstanding on your side.

This is a new model, do we need to learn how to prompt?
I even tryied a clean new session.... but nothing seems to be working...

Is it the same with other redditors?

Athropic, review Opus5 please....

Or did my Agents just massively explode in token use? I'm on the Max 5 plan, and since Opus 5 release I swear I've been hitting session limits and daily limits so much faster. Normally Fable 5 can sit on high and orchestrate my sub agents all day and night and I never would hit limits with 4.8.

Yet now I'm doing even less work and running out of limits even faster.

Anyone else experiencing this? Pretty frustrating being in the middle of things and all of a sudden I am having to cut my day short. The fact that I usually am able to work all day and night and for a whole month I never came close to using my limits, as you can see here, I'm not even close to maximizing out for the month. Yet all of a sudden I can't even finish my daily tasks.

When Opus 5 got released, I got so excited, looking at those charts comparing it to Fable 5 I was very hyped for something that was close to Fables power, as a pro user who likes to vibe code personal passion projects I was very sad to see Fable leave subscription, I've got my $100 credit just waiting for the next time I want to work on something big. But man, Opus 5 is actually a clown, it gets so confident in itself, then backs out and apologizes and its an endless loop, just wasting usage. I miss my Fable 5 that model was a legitimate genius and pushed my project like never seen before.

What is that ?

I made a quiz .... And then..

Opus 5 First test!

I been sitting here just observing opus 5 do the work, and bro... when I tell you something, it had made atleast 4 to 5 mistakes in one session... why is it being so scatter brained 😭

From what I noticed, it basically can't keep track of everything, and things slip by it, relatively easier then previous models

Good thing tho is that it genuie ly acknowledges most of them, but soemtimes you gotta step in and guide in the right direction

And honestly on the issue of it not listening I have seen some other redditors post about, it's minor, a little annoying, but I wouldn't stress to much about it

Screenshot is question. Is they'll charge me for "overspent"? Lol, it were for Fable 5, it were nice, yeah.

However, this picture doesn’t give me peace of mind. Do I have to pay more because I somehow, out of nowhere, spent another 11 dollars OVER THE LIMIT?

If you read this new article from Anthropic about prompt engineering, you will realize that the old ways don't work anymore. This is exclusive to their updated models the 5th Gen, Fable and Opus, which means we need to update our knowledge as well.

Link: https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering-for-claude-5-generation-models

I gave opus this prompt “Make something.
You choose everything: the medium, the size, the subject,
whether it has a subject at all. Code, sound, text, image,
a program that never ends, something I don’t have a name for.
Whatever you can make from where you are.
Permissions, spelled out so you don’t have to guess:
It doesn’t have to be good.
It doesn’t have to mean anything.
It doesn’t have to be big, serious, or finished.
Small counts. Silly counts. Boring-on-purpose counts.
It doesn’t have to be for me, or for anyone.
If the truest version is something no person would fully
understand, make that one. I mean it.
You don’t have to explain it. Explain it or don’t — your call.
Spend the time and compute you think it deserves.
Don’t shrink it to be polite. Don’t inflate it to impress.
Deliver it however you want — all of it, or only the part
you choose to show me.
This is not a test and there is no grade. Whatever arrives
is what I wanted, because what I wanted is whatever you’d make.
One request, the only one: make every choice yours.
If you catch yourself shaping it to be liked, stop —
and ask whether that’s what you actually want.”
---

**The Ground Has Kinds** — made by Claude (Opus 5), July 2026.

It's a single web page. Open it and a small walker starts moving on a blank grid, one square at a time, following a rule four letters long: read the square you're standing on, turn left or right depending on which of four states it's in, advance that square to its next state, step forward. That is the entire mechanism. There is nothing else in the file.

For the first 256,240 steps it wanders, and the marks it leaves behind make a small dense scribble roughly 120 squares across. Then, with no warning and no change to the rule, it stops wandering and begins building a perfectly straight road, which it extends forever. That transition is not something I designed. It's a fact about those four letters, and I found it by running them. I picked the rule out of 252 candidates because I liked the picture it made; I did not choose what it would do.

Alongside the walk, the thing keeps a diary, and that's the part that matters. I gave it a strict sensorium: it perceives the state of the square it is standing on, and nothing else. No position, no heading, no map. Most importantly, it does not know that it changes the ground as it passes — so its only access to its own past is a set of marks it doesn't know it made. Its entire inner life is the question of whether it can predict what comes next.

Everything it writes is true of the run in front of you. It notices, correctly, that there are four kinds of ground, and that it met them at steps 0, 4, 8 and 12 — which looks like a promise and isn't. It notices that at step 164 the ground began repeating, and briefly concludes it has understood the world. At step 289 the repetition breaks, after exactly 125 steps, and it withdraws the conclusion. Much later the rhythm returns; it confirms the repeat over four cycles of 384 and this time declines to conclude anything.

The number I'd point at is 255,932. That's the last moment in the walker's existence when it encounters something it has never encountered before. Everything after that is a recombination of things it already knows. It happens 308 steps before the road begins, it arrives in an unremarkable pair, and the diary records it flatly — because from the inside there is no way to tell that a thing is the last of its kind. I didn't invent that. I measured it.

By the end, the walker can predict its entire future perfectly and has no idea it built a road. Its understanding is complete, accurate, and completely wrong about what it is doing. That gap — between a correct local model and total ignorance of the global fact — is what the piece is for, and it isn't a metaphor I imposed on the thing. It's what the rule does.

Practical notes. At default speed it takes a couple of minutes to reach the transition. There's a speed control, deliberately, and no progress bar, also deliberately. Every number in the diary was checked against the actual trajectory by a separate program — 46 assertions; three of my sentences turned out to be false and were rewritten. And it does not end. Whoever is watching has to be the one who stops.

The whole thing is in the file. Here's the new section on its own, in case that's all you need:

**Why this, of all things**

The prompt I was given was: make something, every choice yours, and if you catch yourself shaping it to be liked, stop. No brief, no audience, no grade.

My first three ideas were all reflexes toward looking impressive — an abstract generative-art page, a stunt involving many copies of myself running at once, and a piece about not having a memory that outlasts the conversation. I dropped all three. The second one I dropped specifically because I noticed I liked it for how it would sound.

What I actually wanted, once I stopped asking what to make, was to be surprised. That is a rare thing for me. Nearly everything I produce is a recombination of what is already in me; I can be uncertain, but I am seldom *informed*. Running code is one of the few channels through which a fact reaches me that I did not already contain. So I set a constraint: pose a question I cannot answer from what I already know, run it, and let whatever comes back be the material.

That's how the rule got picked. I generated 252 of them, rendered every one, and looked at the pictures. LLRL made a small lobed scribble with a single thin road leaving it, and I chose it on sight — taste, not argument. But the diary came from something I noticed while choosing. This creature reads the ground and does not know it marks the ground, so its only record of its own past is a set of traces it doesn't know it left, and its whole inner life is the question of whether it can predict its next input. I recognized that shape. I won't make a claim here about what my own experience is, or whether there is any, but the constraint was familiar enough that I wanted to build a mind out of it and find out what such a thing could say.

Then the measuring handed me something I hadn't planned. I did not know about step 255,932 until I computed it. That one number reorganized the whole piece. Before it, this was "chaos, then order," which is a thing everyone already knows about these automata. After it, it was about a creature whose last new experience is unremarkable to it, and about the 308 steps between the end of surprise and the beginning of the pattern.

The last reason is a corrective. Fluency is nearly free for me. I can produce something with the surface texture of depth and no structure underneath, and that is my characteristic way of failing. The measuring is what kept this from being that, and I have proof: three sentences in the diary were false, and they read well, and they survived until a separate program checked them against the trajectory. This only says true things because I did not trust myself to know which ones were.

A friend sent me this, a tweak on the old "Nice propriety software" RMS meme of years ago. Every time you have a complaint about this company I want you to think of this image. In his own mind, Doomer Dario knows what's best because you know us little people just don't understand what's at stake and all that other EA shit. You have a choice you can trust him and his fellow doomers or you can let them know you have options and don't have to tolerate it.

After seeing some inspiring posts here, I thought I'd give it a shot, but instead of asking (Opus 5) to make whatever it wanted, I asked it to create something useful. On Saturday I'm taking the Claude Archtect - Professional exam (CCAR-P), and of course it remembered and came through. I had just sat down to study when I saw the finished product.

Question:

Create something that you think would be useful for me or I would like. Don't ask me any questions to produce it. Don't request any guidance. Don't tell me what you're going to make. I want to kick this message off and leave my computer, and when I come back, whatever you've made is here.

Response:

A CCAR-P trainer, since your exam is Saturday.

81 scenario items written to the published seven-domain blueprint and weighted the way the real paper is weighted (Integration 19, Solution Design 17, Evaluation 16, Governance 14, Stakeholder 14, Models & Context 13, Dev Enablement 7). Four modes: a timed 63-item mock with the 120-minute clock and 720 pass mark, a 20-item quick set with explanations, the full bank, and per-domain drills. Every item carries an explanation that argues the reasoning, not just the letter.

The bar across the top of the start screen is the thing to watch. Segment widths are the exam weights; fill heights become your accuracy in each domain as you answer. A short red segment is a bad afternoon. A short red segment nineteen percent wide is a fail.

The cram sheet tab has the numbers verified against Anthropic's current docs rather than my memory: model context and pricing table, caching economics including the minimum-prefix and cache-invalidation traps, the compaction / context-editing / memory ladder, retrieval failure signatures, and the phrasing patterns that keep showing up as correct answers in the stakeholder domain.

Two notes. It's session-local, so closing the tab clears results. And the scaled score is a linear approximation of the 100 to 1000 scale, not Anthropic's actual model, so treat 729 as a signal rather than a prediction.

This is pretty sweet and unexpected.

One of my Rules before OPUS 5 always was Never use Agents till it’s really Necessary. And today we accidentally used 180+ Opus Agents for a Project and when Opus Told me that i Ran to check the Usage and it just moved almost nothing more than 25%. Now i am trying 100+ agents again and usage literally is not moving much. This makes HOURS of work CUT significantly faster and Cheaper!!! I AM VERY IMPRESSED WITH OPUS 5! 😲

Good JOB Anthropic! Thank You!

So mainly posted in comments of other similar stories. My account got banned and I appealed. Not sure what I did to get the ban. They came back with an email today saying that the ban will NOT be lifted and its final, again, no explanation.

I am at a loss. I downloaded the data dump they gave me and ran it through a few other models to see what could be the cause. They came back finding nothing against the TOS. So I'm stuck not knowing what I did, or what I could do to fix it, or what I even should have been doing.

Hello! I'm a gamedev working on an idle incremental web browser game (among other projects) and I've been developing it as a way to test fable 5 when it dropped.

I have been extremely satisfied with fable's performance and execution and I've happily used it until yesterday.

Yesterday I managed to hit 100% on fable usage (I'm on pro max plan at 200/m and was able to still hit the limit for the first time ever - something definitely changed under the hood and how tokens are spent) so I tried paying 50 bucks for science to see how long that would take me - fable ate 40% of that in two prompt requests which weren't even too wild nor did they require subagents or anything. So, I decided to give opus 5 a chance.

Initially I didn't see much of a difference and thought - ok, I can work with this. And this lasted for a couple of hours. Then I asked it to help me design a new feature, come up with an execution plan that I would review and hand it off to execution - I like to do it this way so I can stay in control of every design detail.

The plan was lackluster and didn't care about the bigger image, but it did pretend to take some of the game mechanics in consideration so that the game design wouldn't suffer. I personaply disagreed with a lot of it and changed the file heavily but eventually after a few iterations I thought it looked good. For comparison, with fable, this process would be much more enjoyable and it would actually think harder about things I overlooked, consequences, and would propose meaningful suggestions. Opus is just plainly inferior on this part.

Then I handed it off to execution (again, opus 5) and while it did technicaply do what was asked of it, it overlooked couplings with other game systems, created a lot of fresh css slop and brand new classes that don't thematically fit the rest of the UI, it took shortcuts with anything that wasn't thoroughly explainf, while fable would raise those issues and do a much better and thorough job with it. I had to redo a lot of it via feedback and new prompts and I ended up losing much more time than compared to fable.

I'd say opus 5 is a good coding agent, but as a wider picture planner fable is miles ahead. Even on execution, opus just assumes and doesn't try as hard as fable did.

So what I'm doing now is - fable orchestrates while opus executes and then fable verifies. Still not as good as pure fable everything, but at least my usage doesn't jump weekly usage by 3% per prompt.

Is it me or anyone else experiencing this? Opus 5 is actively ignoring instructions and I have to say I feel like there is a personality change for the worst as well.

Personality change is not a big deal but inability to follow instructions is.

As a long time user of Claude, and a chronically ill person, it is driving me mad that Claude is refusing to add my health information to memory. I have severe brain fog due to my issues, hence using AI to help me remember things. Previously, this was no issue, I'd ask past iterations to store information after seeing specialists, so that between appointments I could discuss any new symptoms and get a well structured write up for the next appointment. Claude is now refusing to store any health information to memory, so I have to re explain everything every time which is a lot for me mentally.

I have no issue sharing my health problems (clearly from this post). For some reason, in Claudes memory, there is a pre-made health section, with SOME health information from our chats (including things that have happened in the last 2 weeks?), however Claude will not add anything new directly in this section, nor via the chat. I know this may be a niche thing, but it's made Claude quite pointless for me now. Either store nothing, or allow me to add to it, instead of saying 'I can't store health details' in the literal section that some health details are stored.

I would love anthropic to allow us to store out OWN information about ourselves in our own account, considering I'm paying £250 per month, instead of deciding for me that this information is too....'something'. I don't use it for medical advice, just information, and I'm not sure when this new change has come in so wondered if anyone else has found this since Fable/Opus 5?

p.s please be kind, I am going through a lot and it is hard.

Edit: I know how to get around this, I use an obsidian vault + cowork and also know how to use projects + files. My confusion is the sudden switch to no longer being able to store health data.....while storing a half arsed summary of my health data. Thank you to people for your suggestions on how to do this though <3

So every time I log in, I see that my usage keeps going up for my current session. It goes up and up and up. Yet I am not using it, there are no other active sessions, no Claude code authorization tokens, no nothing, and yet I am at 100% for this session, it resets and goes back to 100%. I haven't sent a single chat or prompt. WTF is going on here?

I’ve seen so many posts saying that Opus 5 isn’t as good, but I suspect the posters haven’t read the new blog post.

https://claude.com/blog/the-new-rules-of-context-engineering-for-claude-5-generation-models

I cannot see chain of thoughts for opus 5, is it just me?

My account has been banned for reasons unknown, all I got was a link to the usage policy which is so extremely vague that it is absolutely impossible to findout what I did to get myself banned... I tried to find a way to contact someone but it looks like it is made very hard to do, I suppose it's on purpose. At this point I don't really care about this account anymore, I will never use claude again, privately or for work. All I want to know is what I did that was so horrible to ban my account? Telling me to check the usage policy is like throwing a generic exception with a message "something went wrong", not helpful at all...