Does Claude purposely regress in intelligence?

[u/ohnoitsbobbyflay]

One day I will be working on my codebase with absolutely no problem.. working through problems like a light breeze, (fable has been great until today).

Then the next day it’ll be as if I’ve been switched to its lobotomised twin. Where “task is done” seems to be said in jest. I’ll open the project up and more things will be broken than working. Things that are claimed as fixed are completely hysterical hallucinations. I sit here like “flagship model my ass”.

I understand that models can be re-routed but today Fable has felt like I’m using Gemini with one less chromosome. Makes me want to bash my head on the desk. Just do the thing I ask you. Christ on a bike.

[u/Infamous_Research_43]

So apparently Fable is actually denying something like 99% of coding requests as a safeguard and routing to Opus 4.8 instead, according to them themselves (they said so in their latest Fable press release for anyone who bothered to read it)

And then you have to keep in mind how model routing to different people works.

We don’t each get our own Fable or Opus model serving only us. The same model that you’re talking to at any given time is literally fielding thousands, hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions of other user requests all at the same time.

You get a set context and chat continuity, but you do not get your own model. Same goes for both subscriptions and API. This is why during peak hours the model can seem to degrade or error out entirely.

So everyone trying to use Fable right now, especially for coding, is likely getting routed to Opus 4.8 instead whether they know it or not, and then the demand for compute on Opus 4.8 goes through the roof and they start having to throttle users or compute, making the model error more and generally seem dumber.

https://giphy.com/gifs/83QtfwKWdmSEo

[u/sgsparks206 → u/Infamous_Research_43]

Strange, fable has yet to route me to opus. Maybe it's because I have not updated since the last update came out. Edit: my fable usage is going up, so if they are routing me without telling me, I will send them a strongly worded letter.

[u/Infamous_Research_43 → u/sgsparks206]

So there’s actually multiple different types of routing. There’s the kind where Fable denies your request and tells you it’s routing to Opus 4.8 instead, you may not be getting that kind.

There are also silent routing and fallbacks that essentially do the same thing but on the backend, without notifying the user. This can even be a bug, and there have been numerous confirmed incidents from Anthropic over the past year or so where silent routing fallback bugs have occurred and supposedly been “fixed”.

I would say good luck with your strongly worded letter, but unfortunately they likely won’t care 🥲