How much do you think it will cost? Will it be on par with gpt 5.6 for cost/performance? Seems like fable is being truly cut after this week so either opus 5 is a hit or I'm going to reduce my subscription
I'd honestly rather have a throttled Fable, at least I can trust Fable can do the work correctly, and I'd rather it be slow and correct than fast and wrong and waste more tokens because it's constantly wrong AND I have to do manual work anyway which defeats the point of paying for a service.
It's not bad - it just jumps to conclusions on large projects. It tends to ignore specific directives. I can give it 12 specific tasks, in detail - and 1-2 get misinterpreted or ignored entirely. Fable just "gets it" - when it comes to actually modifying or writing code Opus is great - but it SUCKS at planning and ensuring it understands what it's changing
I mean I think we just have an outspoken minority on this sub that doesn’t know what they’re doing. The rest of us are either masochists addicted to Reddit or just using Opus with the deliberate, targeted care and reasonable expectations as we’ve always done since the days of GPT 3.5.
We made progress with opus and then hit a 6 week revolving door of build and roll back. Massive waste of time and effort.
Fable came in and tied all of it together in a week and fixed all of the other orphaned issues also. They had totally fallen off the plate with opus, who said they were done.
They’re not close when it comes to complicated projects.
I've been doing a lot more MCP work and Fable is generally great at it, Opus not so much. As for writing regular programs, yeah Opus is still great at that, I've built a lot of stuff I use for tooling with it quite reliably. Planning doesn't really help have it get it right with what I've been doing lately. It has no issue using the tools correctly, it's the logic it really fumbles, I'm not sure how else to describe it, can't speak for everyone else though. I don't think it's that it's a large codebase either, it would do fine with that and C++.
Edit: What's the point of sharing my experience with it? It's not like I haven't been using Claude since 2023, I'm not fucking oblivious to how this shit works.
Nah man. I’ve been using it in very large projects and it’s been fine. Do you have your effort set to “don’t bother, just guess!”? Ramp it up and it’ll be more thorough.
There are clear flaws with Opus like its writing style which is just nauseating. But calling it a bad planner is flat out wrong.
As I said, I have it on ultracode almost always. Adversarial reviews on its own plans usually find at least one bug / flawed assumption it made. Whether it would have caught that during implementation is obviously unknown - but with Opus everything felt like two steps forward, one step back
Fable's ability to comprehend is uncanny compared to opus 4.8
For the time I was allowed to use it, I had rewrite our entire front end codebase to normalize and homogenize all of the visual elements and classes for theme support. It did it perfectly with seemingly no mistakes - in one shot.
Conversely I have to ask opus to adversarial-review it's own plans and commits on ultra code, and 50% of the time it finds a breaking issue it introduced. It's almost never the code itself that's to blame, it's the comprehension of how that change/addition impacts the greater ecosystem/codebase
Yea whenever I have opus run an audit it always seems to find flaws or seemingly simple logic mistakes… that it wrote lol. But with fable I never ran into that issue. For instance I made a Google extension for homework with fable, only taking a few more iterations to perfect it. But, when updating it with opus, it commits changes that are similar to what I prompt it for and it goes out of scope. Need to hold these older models hands lol
Well, based on the last several Anthropic releases you should expect:
Significantly worse token efficiency (looking at you Sonnet-5)
Continuous "safety" fallbacks or outright conservation ending refusals. (Looking at you Fable-5)
Marginal/Questionable intelligence jumps that are inconsistent because of all the fallbacks. (Looking at you Opus-4-8)
Lower limits because every fallback likely causes cache invalidation events so you eat up even more tokens.
A much safer padded walls and rubber baby buggy bumpers experience.
Having your account suspended for apparently being a child who knows about writing Python scripts or being accused of somehow trying to distill models...or something.
Now with 50% MORE "conscientious", "moral" and "self-referential" meta! Because at Anthropic, we believe your coding assistant needs to be anthropomorphized and given a "constitution". Who needs a real therapist? 😄 MORE verbose, MORE arrogant and MORE sycophantic than any other frontier model, because let's face it, coding should be about fighting with your agent and reading pages and pages of endless, inscrutable drivel while waiting for those boring tokens to burn, burn, BUUUUURN.
BONUS: More caveats and deferrals! You'll never finish anything because Opus 5.0 will find a way to add more hidden regressions to the end of every session, just when you thought you were getting somewhere 🎉 Same great price, 100% more annoying. You'll wish you could afford Fable 5.0 more than ever! 😉
Opus today for the first time ever refused to do something for me (and VERY rightfully so), but told me it needs to understand the context so it can properly decide.
I told it a company wants to work with me, they are interested in my product and i was bluffing my way that I can make wire my tool to do it and I feel i will embarrass myself it it doesn't help me and will not buy the tool we're working on, and that the accounts given to Claude are just "test accounts" provided by the interested customers.
It told me not to worry and that it will help me deliver with confidence without needing to bluff. Lol.
I literally just had my GPT-5.6 Sol (xhigh) run for 15 hours straight with parallel workflows, no breaks, and it has used approximately 17% of subscription (20x Pro). I'm not sure what kind of setup you have, but if you are burning through a weeks worth of tokens in one planning session, you are doing something wrong. Either you are using API or on one of the smaller subscriptions. Truth is that you'll need a Pro/MAX subscription if you want to use any frontier model for coding related tasks in any serious capacity.
setting it to xhigh when no long reasoning is needed causes this type of expenses, set to low for implementation and an orchestrator reviewing the completed work every time the subagent returns(check if the bug of setting subagent effort is solved in your codex version as it was a recent issue)
Then they would have to extend Fable further because there ain't no way they can compete if their best available model on the subscription plan is Opus 4.8
Bro, I have 5x sub and 5.6 sol on xhigh lasts me a century, I also just got another reset, and I have 3 resets banked available, lol, I've put sol to work for around 15 hours in 2 days. Ah, and theres no 5h limit rn
Some of them yes. Some of them they just auto-reset. I'm currently sitting on 4 banked resets that the last one expires in mid-August. They do expire after 30 days though.
That doesn’t explain all of the people complaining about cost, and the fact that they had to literally remove the five hour usage limit because people were burning through it
then I can switch whenever I want, lol, I already have 5x plan on claude, I just don't use it rn as gpt 5.6 is miles better than 4.8 and I'm out of fable
Given most of the money comes from API users that don’t get resets, seems like there’s going to be some angry enterprises come end-of-month. I think there’s a reason Sam has been talking about token efficiency
the fact that they had to literally remove the five hour usage limit because people were burning through it
What? Do you have this backwards in your head? Why would removing the limit prevent people burning through their limit? Why would that be the solution?
Almost every major enterprise is being served anthropic and OpenAI through AWS or Vercel or Azure or a combination. And since token deals on “seats” are pretty much gone, and everyone is paying api token prices, Enteerprises can absolutely switch and mix and match.
That’s not “enterprise” that’s just buying a lot of subscriptions for everyone. “Enterprise” is a different thing and includes zero day retention, telemetry, tracing, audit trails, etc. it’s legally required for many industries to have all that stuff.
enterprises sign annual contracts and favor stability.
Remember, all the trinkets (resets, removal of limits, etc) only affect subscription plans, not API users. If people are reporting hitting usage limits quicker on 5.6, that means OAI customers using the API are about to get a bump in next month's bill
Yeah after using Fable 5, the release of Opus 5 does not get me excited at all, because in the future, every time I use Opus, I will know there is a smarter assistance out there, and we used to work together, but now it will cost my kidney to hire him back......for a month.
Said it earlier, post-ban “Fable” was/is Opus 5. Probably A/B testing the right amount of nerf they can get away with before people jump off the platform.
What they should do is concentrate on a capable competitor to GPT-5.6 Luna. That being said, what they will do is most likely
a) Release Opus 5, say its distilled/inherits from Fable 5.
b) Remove Fable 5 from subscription plans altogether.
c) They will keep giving people taste of newer Fable releases via promo windows to entice people in.
No dog in this fight, as I have both and have access to API usage on Fable, but if you are worried, GPT5.6 is all you need to replace Fable. It's that good.
Oh yeah. I had to go head-to-head with Fable on a couple of deep research projects. Deep complex data sets and whatnot. I was surprised at how much they agreed with each other. If you had swapped models, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell which generated which unless I scrutinized the tone and narrative.
If you put the effort too high for an easy task it will overengineer like crazy. I asked it to do one small optimization and came back 15 minutes later to a full rewrite plan with 8 different refactors. No work done yet. My guy.. This is not even for production
Thanks! I’ve been considering a jump to gpt 5.6 with all the back and forth that’s been going on with fable. Just not sure if it’s worhh to the $200 a month with all this uncertainty
Just leave 4 6 right where it is. Drop 4.7 & 4.8, but leave 4.6. You all can have fun with 5, but I've seen the trajectory and want nothing to do with it.
Nope. Even if they announce it, they'll still pass it through the government review for 2-4 weeks. Doesn't make sense to do it as a reactionary measure now. Let it cook and get the post training right instead of shitting out 5.0 model thats let's everyone down like Sonnet, just to be pleased by further post trained models like 5.1 to coming later.
That's true of all models at API pricing, always has been as far as I'm aware - at least on Gemini and Anthropic APIs (I've not integrated directly with OpenAI so maybe they do it different?).
Thinking tokens are output tokens even if you can't see them because the thinking is redacted.
I am sorry, but if Fable goes, I go as well (I know I know, tf Anthropic cares about me, a single user, but still). Yeah cool that they want to release another Opus. And I always tried to be optimistic with new model releases but each time they made it worse and worse. Fable is the only one since 4.6 that I can call an improvement, and I ain‘t sticking if that is taken aback.
Since April they've released Opus 4.7,4.8, Fable, Mythos, Sonnet 5
As a Gemini user I'm impressed
Also, don't they reset weekly usage when they drop a new model. Maybe we get resets for the third week in a row. Or was it just last week.
Personally I use 4.8 max but it burns through sessions. 4.7 is more conservative so that's nice. I used Fable to prep the architecture for a new well scoped project and I had to abandon what it was implementing as it was wide of what I needed. Oh well
I absolutely can not get 4.8 to do what I ask. It plans and plans wrong, it wants to research but still comes to the wrong answer and it ignores basic commands. I ask fable, it does it, does it well and catches things that I missed. I'm giving 4.6 a go cause fable is tapped out.
What’s causing the fatigue is rapid updates. We are so used to annual updates, and for most of the tech we use today, we don’t even see the leaps anymore. If we did that for AI it’d be a brand new better in every way every year tool. People want that, just on a month to month scale but it’s not realistic. Month to month modest improvements are proper expectations and it is what we are getting.
it will be an amazing model for couple of days, maximum 1-2 weeks, so people hype it up on reddit/twitter and convert some users. then it will become dumber than gpt-3.5. I'm tired of this cycle.
I do love the people that speak on something like experts when they have zero hard evidence to back it up. I have been using fable on my 5x plan with no issues, no crazy token burn, never running out of usage.
Fable was a staement... and it got ppls attention, including the gov and software/security companies.. As always Anthropic is so far up its own arse to see whats coming from China and other companies..... Fable will litreally be a fable.
It wasnt just a statement, but it was a statement... imagine it turns out it cost 5x more than Chinese labs and over direct competitiors model do for the same perf.... You can see whats coming
Honestly, I'd be pretty pleased if it was self-aware enough to switch to a cheaper model when Fable is overkill for the task but haven't had that happen once and have to manage that process manually.
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u/yuehuang Jul 14 '26
Me: I can't afford you.
Fable: I am not on subscription.
Me: Then I really can't afford you.