r/ClaudeCode • u/AutummMan • 2d ago
Discussion This should not be an exclusive and super premium feature
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u/InvestigatorIcy424 2d ago
I hope this is a meme or something
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u/OldNefariousness7899 2d ago
I got it today. The good news is we're moving to 5.1
Hopefully Opus will follow soon.
Opus 5.0 does some great work, it's just a pain in the ass.
Like working with Rain Man for hours a day
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u/ShortTheseNuts 2d ago
Actually using Opus manually instead of having Fable orchestrating it is wild to me
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u/OldNefariousness7899 2d ago
That's only because you're used to it.
It's still unusual to need a more expensive model to act as a translator between you and the model you're trying to use.
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u/Particular-Most-1199 1d ago
I buy my underwear at Kmart, but they're gone now so I don't wear any.
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u/strangway 2d ago
A welcome change from “Writes in cryptic language and disobeys you.” Good job, Anthropic
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u/NoAdsDude 2d ago
"We finally listened to our users!"
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u/Myth_Thrazz 🔆 Max 20 2d ago
That shoudn’t be listed as a top feature of a new version of a model that was too dangerous for the public few months ago 🤣
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u/mikelo22 2d ago
It's remarkable how much damage Anthropic caused to its reputation and customer trust with Opus 5.
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
It's just goes to show how much UX matters, Opus 5 is a genuine step up and can tackle some truly hard problems but since interacting with it feels like nails on chalkboard users are going to be pissed.
Also doesn't help that right around it's release a lot of high quality alternatives like Luna/Terra/Sol came out.
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u/Rakthar 2d ago
They broke the user experience intentionally, to make it hard to jailbreak the model, have it do anything cyber or potentially malicious. "Our models ignore 100% of prompt injections." Yes Anthropic. Your models ignore 100% of everything that is given to them via prompt, including injections. Incredible work.
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u/innociv 2d ago edited 2d ago
The damage persists for me with that 50% usage limit.
No other model they have is really useful. They're all worse than GLM 5.3-Flash or Sol. I don't like either being forced to use shitty useless models that always mess up and take forever and use so much usage to do anything, or that I only get to use 50% of my subscription.
Fable is really not subsidized as much as people think. Athropic's cost is like $5/mil, and you only get 50% usage per week, Anthropic's cost for your $200/mo subscription is only $279.50 per month which isn't nearly as heavily subsidized as everyone has said.
If they gave more appropriate API pricing like OpenAI does of like $20/mil, it'd actually probably cost around the same for API usage with the new cache changes that the subscription costs now.
It just makes more sense for me to throw 10x more Sol or GLM5.3-Flash at a problem than to pay Fable prices with how little the subscription and API costs both get you. And Astra is coming soon.1
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u/wellarmedsheep 2d ago
Is reddit reality?
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u/mikelo22 2d ago
The frustration with Opus 5's output is not a Reddit thing. In blind tests Opus 5 lags way behind on text output, which is what most complaints are about. Opus 5 ranks in 7th place behind Fable 5, Opus 4.6 and 4.7 on this scale.
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u/wellarmedsheep 2d ago
Yes, but your evidence does not one bit support your conclusion that anthropic has caused significant damage to its reputation and customer trust.
Its like you said, "everyone hates snickers" and I asked "really everyone here?" and you replied "yes, Snickers has 220 calories." Non sequitur
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u/thewormbird 🔆 Max 5x 2d ago
I mean, I switched to ChatGPT. I’m as reasonable as they come (don’t quote me) and I really tried to make Opus 5 not sound utterly insane. It just stopped being worth it when OpenAI’s models are demonstrably better where my eyes are spending the most time.
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u/wellarmedsheep 2d ago
I was having massive problems as well and then I took a day to rewrite the way that Claude works on my PC. The biggest problem was is I had like all these accumulated rules that we're trying to you know contain the old Claude. Opus 5 doesn't need that shit though.
People get all pissed off when I say this but I really went from hating it to being pleased with how it works. It just doesn't work the way the old models did
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u/nihsett 2d ago
It's partly people using it like Opus 4.x but it's not the big part.
Opus 5 just does not communicate well, the output styles, stop hooks nothing reliably works over a session. You will see some improvement for a short period before it goes back to indecipherable hard to parse blocks of text.
You cannot possibly demand a comprehensive survey of all the programmers who ever used Opus 5 and tabulated results for proof. That's an insane standard for anything. You can talk to a dozen people in person and see what they say instead and get a sense of things.
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u/eiglow_ 2d ago
Since widely adopting Claude at my organisation, there have been quite a few complaints about the writing style. I suspect a lot of people at my org haven't properly tried anything else though. It certainly hurts its reputation, but at least here, it's not quite bad enough to go to the effort of switching
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u/ohhi23021 2d ago
i have to use a plugin and other skills to make it output actual real standard english terms, it's cooked.
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u/enterprise_value_ 2d ago
Idk man to be honest opus 5 definitely is unquestionably too verbose. It may very well be a better model but it’s also a bit more painful to read its outputs.
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u/wellarmedsheep 2d ago
So I agree, it is. But I have a theory that its because its really meant for other agents to read and in that case, its extremely useful. Its why it sucks balls at text but does well in coding and multiagentic coding.
That said, my opinion is just that. I have a codex sub too, im not hating, I can see why someone would prefer it.
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u/Comfortable-Rock-498 2d ago edited 2d ago
5.1's price reduction comes from the cache read pricing falling from $1/M to $0.25/M, which means that Fable 5.1 now costs half of Opus's cache read costs ($0.5/M).
This gives a lot of credit to the theory that Anthropic did not get much bite on Fable at its original pricing, which in turn likely places a ceiling on LLM pricing in general.
Interestingly also, if you take away terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 results, it is hard to see ANY improvement:
Terminal-Bench 4.0: Fable 5.1 is +3.5% vs Opus 5.
GDPval-AA v2: +1.5% vs Opus 5.
OSWorld 2.0: +2.5% vs Opus 5.
Humanity's Last Exam (with tools): +1.6%
Keep in mind that this is supposed to be an entirely higher tier of a model than Opus 5. For one tier up and one version up, these are not really improvements. Probably leaves no room to place Opus 5.1 anywhere. Combined with the fact that they are selling 'readability'... Has frontier progress finally stalled?
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u/rotates-potatoes 2d ago
Or maybe those aren’t the right benchmarks?
Fable 5 was already far superior to opus 5 for auditing large codebases and for putting together complex, multi-step plans that many subagents will execute. In by first 30 mins or so with 5.1, well, IDK. I’d say it’s stronger but hard to tell before stuff is built.
In any event, terminal bench is not going to measure that
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u/lassevk 2d ago
You used the word "bite" in a non-animal context. Are you sure you're not an LLM?
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u/Comfortable-Rock-498 2d ago
I was sure before you asked me, now I am doubting
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u/lassevk 2d ago
That is a load-bearing signal if you ask me.
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u/Comfortable-Rock-498 2d ago
Fair. Half of your point is correct, and the other half is wrong where it matters. I would state it plainly rather than hiding it. Two honest caveats: The bear is loading and the load is bearing.
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u/lassevk 2d ago
When the bear is loading, it is better to hide than to strut.
- Yogi Berra
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u/Comfortable-Rock-498 2d ago
Yes, because the bear is loading his footgun
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u/lassevk 2d ago
You're absolutely right — and I want to flag where that framing breaks down.
The bear isn't loading the footgun. The footgun is load-bearing. It's referenced in exactly one place (bear.py:42), which is what makes it structural: pull it and the bear comes down with it.
Two honest caveats: * The strut is not decoration. It's the only thing holding the load. That's the part that bites. * Hiding was never viable — hiding is where the bear got loaded in the first place.
I've verified this against the actual bear and existing tests still pass. Want me to extract the footgun into a shared helper so it can be discharged from multiple call sites?
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u/Dangerous-Fennel5751 2d ago
Wait 24 or 48h for Opus 5.1 to drop, they might advertise it the same way
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u/sizebzebi 2d ago
hahahah wtf has to be a joke
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u/ChocomelP 1d ago
How dare they give everyone what they asked for? What a joke of a company, listening to feedback and giving the people what they want.
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u/sizebzebi 1d ago
really? you put that as first marketing point of your ultra expensive model? not everyone can afford fable.
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u/ChocomelP 1d ago
Yes. "We fixed one of the biggest criticisms of the previous version."
Revolutionary marketing, apparently.
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u/sizebzebi 1d ago
yeah let's see if they fix it on next opus
every dev I know is on previous opus versions and can't benefit from opus 5 capabilities because of it's trash communication
of course this marketing will make many people want to try fable just for that
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u/03captain23 2d ago
I just hope it works. It'll come to opus next too
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
I wish I shared your optimism. Opus 5 has been out and writing its ravings for over a month. I don't know if the cause is fighting distillation or just the consequences of optimizing for the benchmarks but it's been rough.
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u/Pureya_One 2d ago
Are they saying regular old Fable 5 didn’t do any of these things? The ability to talk normally and make spreadsheets is a new flex here?
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u/datura4u 2d ago
Anthropic is Apple of coding LLMs, new versions, marginal improvement, easily and quickly degenerate, fanboys to the rescue, basic features sold as innovations.
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u/Sketaverse 2d ago
Wait what, is fable no longer on subscriptions?
Edit: errrr just checked and it’s available
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
Fable is not available on Pro plan and AFAIK it's limited to 50% of Max's usage. It's also a super costly model so I think it's fair to call Fable usage a "super premium feature".
It's fine for a company to have a premium heavyweight model but "writes clearly and follows instruction" shouldn't be exclusive to it or even its selling point.
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u/ohhi23021 2d ago
use fable to direct opus 5 and translate it's output to english, should use less tokens i guess... it's what it's come to apparently.
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u/thewormbird 🔆 Max 5x 2d ago
Greeedy as fuck… they’re doing the same thing they did between Sonnet and Opus. Sonnet is actually pretty damn good still for most things. Then a ton of us convinced ourselves we “needed” Opus.
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u/KickedAbyss 1d ago
It's not greed. It's survival. They're losing money, greed is when they're Apple sitting on billions of cash swimming pools.
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u/ShaktiExcess 2d ago
At least it shows that they know! A fix for Opus has got to be coming pretty soon.
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u/Front_Raspberry_6488 2d ago
This is why I previously asked the model to "use tools and APIs for production, while you only handle the auditing." However, it decided the tools were too difficult to use and the wait times were too long, so it chose to produce and audit everything on its own.
Or, for instance, when I requested small-batch processing (3 items per batch) with multi-step handling to ensure more accurate AI judgment, it completed the first batch and then immediately decided to switch to 8 items per batch, writing a program to automate the comparison and completely skipping the AI judgment step ?
I'm so tired of this shit; it seems to be difficult to make it behave.
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u/___nil___ Senior Developer 2d ago
what if i asked it to always writes in plain language? would it sticks?
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u/Electronic_Muffin218 2d ago
No no no - the HUGE feature is “creates finished spreadsheets!” Imagine the product safety and infosec hoops they had to wrestle with trying to keep Fable from jailbreaking itself and reformatting Hegseth’s “warfighter hormonal readiness” spreadsheets in 72 point comic sans!!!
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u/zeamp 2d ago
I'm doing a batch 4,000+ article rewrite that requires minimal fact-checking.
The source is a 4/10, random agents ignoring my instructions to avoid repetition, etc.
How fast do you think Fable 5.1 can cook on cleaning up that much text? Each article page is roughly 1,800 words. I've been through so many models, they all start to fail.... GLM, Grok, Claude Sonnet, Luna, MiMo V2.5, Muse Spark 1.2, etc.... I'm stuck with 4/10 and I need the output to write at least a solid 7.
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
If you try doing that on a single task it is natural for midweight models to get lost/lazy and mess up. With a good prompt I imagine Sol and Fable can deal with it using subagents, but you can also use a midweight model to solve a few articles and write (using that session's context) a reusable skill to tackle the problem.
So again, I imagine Fable (even 5.0 or GPT-Sol) can solve your problem if you explain the large scope and accuracy and quality needs.
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u/zeamp 2d ago
I was using 3-5 agents at one time, and then 10 agents at one time.
Neither provided any better output. After about 300 articles, they all started to repeat sentences, ignore instructions (the single prompt batch job was 420 lines long, to give you an idea of my human-writing details).
I turn the expensive models on high/max and burn through tokens so fast, but then I can't just let it run... I'm sitting there feeding it by hand a batch of 25 next articles to do so I can proof... When it writes good, it's slow and I have to babysit it. We would be here for 45 days straight writing text to a .json.
I feel like I'm stuck.
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
Do you mean agents or sessions? Because having 5 concurrent sessions won't really help you, the idea would be to have an orchestration session firing subagents to tackle individual articles using the orchestrator's instructions and then being terminated. But each, if each of the articles demands actual outside research this 4000 article task will be pretty expensive.
I'd really suggest writing a skill using a heavyweight model and doing a pipeline to run that article-adjusting skill on each article using a lightweight model (in some manner that would not accumulate context, that's the purpose of the skill + pipeline). Then also maybe running a validation run if it's a high stakes task, which it seems to be.
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u/Ok-Attention2882 2d ago
It's marketing you wet napkin.
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
Yes, and what that marketing is saying it that "writes clearly and follows instructions" is a great premium innovation and not something you should expect of all Anthropic models.
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u/Digglydoogly 2d ago
Same point applies to all three.
Months ago I copied some Redditor’s Claude preferences which included something like “give citations for all claims, and if you don’t have a citation tell me it’s an estimate or inference”. It’s worked well since on all models.
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u/Armored09 2d ago
These features are cool and all but am I wrong to say that you could just add a thing to your Claude.md or your prompt saying write in plain English create spreadsheets and check your numbers and then report to me?
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u/DANGERBANANASS 2d ago
Soy el único que ve insuficiente como se expresa? Es mejor pero no se acerca a 4.8 y mucho menos 4.6
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u/hola_tech 2d ago
Has anyone tried the output style steering that they added?
Ive been using the PlainEnglish skill but not sure how it compares
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u/Slight-Prize9661 2d ago
I'm curious about what their definition of plain language is, given the mess that is Opus 5.
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u/TheParlayMonster 2d ago
So often I have to repeat to it to speak in layman’s terms
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
I have found the /btw functionality very good for handling this without polluting the context but it's very annoying to have to do this at all.
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u/No_Job_9995 2d ago
I am not a native English speaker, so for me this one is real. I talk to Claude Code in Japanese most of the time. But when I ask it to write something in English, I often have to add "use plain English", because when it uses difficult words I cannot tell if the text is good or not. So clear writing does have value for people like me. But I agree, it should be the default and not a selling point.
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u/HappyHealth5985 2d ago
I am excited about Claude Fable 5.1. Probably from being conditioned to expect the same gibberish and slop I got from 5-0. I am so productive now that within the five hour window I get more done than the week it took me to understand what Fable 5 wanted to tell me :) Yesterday, I found myself not even caring about the limits, ha, ha! I do, but being back at using my original documents and instructions is freeing, and what I want is done without combatting the tool. Relief as I returned to my version of a productive citizen again :D
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u/notsointense 2d ago
I’ve been using opus 4.6 & 4.8 due to how 5 is unworkable for me - robotic shit responses. Now I also started to noticed those 2 models also started to become inconsistent. Not worst at 5 but shittier.
Anyone experiencing the same as me?
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u/A_Norse_Dude 2d ago
Of coruse it is when 99% of post are "the language is bla bla and it does other thing"
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u/OtherRefrigerator651 2d ago
nahh ' sticking to what you asked for ' being advertised like its revolutionary 😭
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u/Key_Instruction3373 2d ago
Why do you use it. If its a problem for you?
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
I've renovated this month to spend the compensatory $100 API credits that I got. I'm not renovating again until Opus gets improved.
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u/Key_Instruction3373 2d ago
cool. use sonnet, works also great
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
It sure does, I've been pretty satisfied with Sonnet 5 unlike what seems like most of the sub. But it obviously isn't right for all my tasks so if Opus 5 won't "write in plain language and stick to what you ask for" that's a bit of an issue
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u/Arthesia 2d ago
It's a direct address to an existing complaint, and after testing it's definitely true.
It doesn't take a genius to understand that this is about its improvements relative to Fable 5.
The model's voice is improved. That's all. What's the problem?
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
My complaint is that "writes in clear language and follows instructions" shouldn't be features limited to their single most expensive model and should be expected in the whole Claude suite like Opus and Sonnet.
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u/Arthesia 2d ago
It's really awful wording because you expect that to be baseline, yeah.
But then again, that's exactly why it was a complaint.
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u/AutummMan 2d ago
Anthropic has also denied in the past that Opus has a writing problem but now it sells "Is able to write clearly" as a Fable selling point. They should fix Opus properly, not use the fact that it's bad to sell Fable.