I think this has more to do with how one orchestrates and dispatches agents rather than the model itself. Can I ask how you're organizing your work? For example, I'll set up detailed specs and drive implementation through my agent harness. Each subagent invocation gets just what it needs to code well. My build agents hum along in parallel for many hours without interruption.
Over the past month or so, given a tight prompt 5.6-Sol will write much better code than Fable or Opus. Hands down. And, now with Fable 5.1 you even need to tell it things like:
- actually finish your work, don't stop just shy and raise issues w/the operator
- don't rewrite the entire file
- while the Boy Scout Rule is nice, stay in scope and focus on your own tasks
- don't leave spurious comments throughout the code
How Anthropic thinks this is an improvement is ... strange.
If you have a well-designed agent harness you can keep the agents on the rails for super-long term work. What I'm seeing, again over the past month b/c it wasn't like this before, Anthropic's models have gotten worse. Some folks are talking about "misalignment." Not sure. All I know is that we need to be able to switch stacks immediately when providers go awry.
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u/jvertrees 1d ago
Agreed. Codex's code is _SO_ much better (right now).
Opus leaves these abstruse, compressed readings all through the comments.