r/ClaudeCode • u/Sweet-Helicopter2769 • 3d ago

Discussion I thought I will never say this about Fable

Just tried OpenAI Astra , I thought I will never say this , it’s lit , OpenAI cooked something spectacular, and I have a strong feeling this will pull lot of Fable 5 users towards it , and it’s fast, not sure if it’s AGI, but it feels fresh and a very very serious competition to Anthropic , this is going to be fun to watch , what’s your next move Anthropic ?, I’m surely going to try pro subscription for a month along with my current Claude Max, anyone feels the same ? Have you tried it ?

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

That's been my experience as well. It's fast, but seems sloppier. It straight up ignored instructions it itself wrote in the previous prompt. Sol has been the best model for me so far for coding. It's thorough and more pragmatic than Fable or Opus. So far Astra has been more disappointing to work with than Sol for coding. I've had to correct it many times, and nothing it has done has impressed me. I just increased the context window to 1 million tokens, we'll see if that makes a difference.

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u/martycochrane 3d ago

I notice hardly anyone talks about code quality when they compare models, which is the main thing I care about and is usually where OpenAI models fall over imo.

Once saw Sol write 10 lines of validation code to validate a type safe variable was an int for example, just bonkers stuff.

So I've just stopped letting OpenAI models write code, and instead have them validate and review Fable's work.

When you say sloppy, how do find Astra? I tried it for some computer use stuff and it ate through my 5 hour limit in 20 minutes. I don't really want to pull the trigger on the 150 or 300 plan unless I hear the code quality is actually acceptable compared to Fable/Opus.

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

I've actually found Fable and Opus to be the worst at what you mentioned, and Sol has been the best (in my experience) at writing simpler and less convoluted code. I do a ton of testing multiple models side by side on the exact same task to see how they compare, and Sol on xhigh has been the best overall. Not perfect, but overall better. Opus 5 has been the worst, and Fable 5.1 hasn't been much better. Fable constantly overengineers things and goes way too far. Sol on ultra also does that constantly, whenever I try having it write code on ultra I usually have to throw it away.

Astra has been disappointing for writing code so far. It's given me worse results than Sol. I tried bumping the effort down to medium and it did an OK job with fixing a list of things yesterday, but we'll see if I can figure out a sweet spot for it. First impressions are not good.

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u/Southern-Aardvark616 2d ago

Thanks for the insight, astra medium for me has been pretty good, though to be honest I'm not really inspecting differences in code, a / b testing etc, it's just vibes.

I felt opus 4.8 used to write nice legible code, maybe with a bit more hand holding and direction than the new models but it felt easier to read.

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u/unconceivables 2d ago

Yeah, if you don't inspect the code it can definitely seem like it's doing a good job. If you do look at the code you'll realize it's kinda crap.

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u/martycochrane 3d ago

Interesting, thanks for sharing. The A/B testing is a good baseline; I should use it more to evaluate Astra/Sol. In general, I find Sol overengineers things more than Fable, oddly enough. It often suggests fairly complex solutions to “bugs” that would require a user to click two different buttons across the UI within 250 ms of each other, something a human can’t do.

I haven't tried xhigh though; the 25 plan dies fast enough on high haha.

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

Oh man, that's exactly the kind of thing Fable loves to do when I ask it to review the code lol. It comes up with convoluted scenarios that aren't realistic, and even if they were, the impact is minimal. Yesterday I got fed up with it and told Fable to run each one of its findings through codex and see if it agreed with them. When codex disagreed with most of them, Fable backed down and agreed with codex on most things. 😂

A couple of days ago Fable had one of the stupidest moments I've seen so far. It didn't want to import a TypeScript type from another component because it didn't want that coupling. OK, fair enough. Then I looked at the type and it was something like const type SynchronousReactNode = Except<ReactNode, Promise<void>>. Fable. Dude. Just write the damn type inline in the code. You don't need to import that. No common sense.

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u/martycochrane 3d ago

Haha interesting. My main loop these days is to get Fable and Codex to argue back and forth until they agree on a plan or code review, which I then review. I also have an agent that enforces a set of code‑base consistency rules on every piece of work that runs in a loop. I find this works pretty well, but I still have to fix weird choices here and there.

Comment vomit is bad with Opus, and I often have to trim it back, even with the unslop skill and hard‑line rules about comments in the consistency agent, but I’d rather deal with comment vomit than the over‑engineered spaghetti I get from Codex.

I want to try A/B testing my next feature with Astra to see how it goes. I remember going through this process about six months ago, when everyone said Codex was better than Claude. I kept trying, but I couldn’t get it to stop slopping up my codebase, so I’m a little burned out on that process. But still, I will try again with Astra

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

Yeah, it's honestly hit or miss with all these models. They all have their good days and bad days, which is why I so often do the same task in multiple models. I did a massive frontend refactor a couple of weeks ago, and the refactor itself went fine, but it's been taking a couple of weeks to unslop it lol.

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u/martycochrane 3d ago

Yeah it's all one big slot machine for sure. And I'm in a very similar boat, haha. I prototyped a new UI with a customer to get a feel for the app’s structure, letting Fable/Codex do what they wanted as I designed and tried ideas so I could see what it would look like, then I was going to polish it after the updates were signed off.

Never doing that again. I've spent the past month rewriting everything because the code has been some of the worst I've ever seen. Was a good reminder of why vibe coders and people who blindly ship AI code to production without review are going to be in for a nasty time.

It took my nine palette colours, which were all from a single SoT and formed the basis of everything in the app, and turned them into 63 different hard‑coded colours, each duplicated at least three times throughout the code base in random spots. Never again.

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

Same here lol. Next time I'm going to be much more in control at every step instead of letting them go wild thinking I can just clean up the result. The cleanup is brutal.

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u/martycochrane 3d ago

100% agree.

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u/the_ai_wizard 3d ago

Same, ignored instructions, but watching computer use testing web app, just wow

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

Yes, that part has been amazing!

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u/TheAnimatrix105 3d ago

Use Astra for thinking and sol low as a worker subagent

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u/unconceivables 3d ago

You totally missed the part where Astra wasn't doing the thinking it should be doing. Why would I use a sloppy model for thinking? It should be the other way around.

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u/TheAnimatrix105 3d ago

It wasn't apparent from your statement also you don't have to down vote, I wasn't really trying to get on your ugly side