Hacker News

I shifted from DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 to Gemini 3.7 flash on openrouter and price shoots up almost double with no visible change in outcome. So, today I reverted back.

I was struck by a video ad that Google released yesterday with testimonials by three developers about using Gemini 3.7 Flash [1]. The point they emphasize most is price, followed by latency. The marketing strategy definitely seems to be shifting.

[1] https://youtu.be/kacf2bib-X0

> Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price.

I assume it's highly use case dependent, though?

Even before the price cut seems like Sol was price competitive with Kimi

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-6-sol-xhig...

And now it should be considerably cheaper

> And these models are not going away, nor their prices going up [...]

Well, DeepSeek just raised prices.

I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any model to do, and it does great. For the more advanced stuff, it definitely needs the effort bumped. But even with the effort bumped, the token usage really doesn't seem to skyrocket too badly until at least you hit xhigh and max, which really only seem to be necessary if you are doing genuine crazy stuff, so it's not that bad. I did similar stuff with Fable. In fact, I went directly from an Anthropic subscription with Fable to an OpenAI subscription with Sol, more or less, and it really felt pretty seamless. If anything, I was thrilled to realize how much I actually preferred Codex CLI, to the point where I started using it at work too.

Fable seems to be generally more impressive at outputting one-shot web apps. I'm not really saying that to try to downplay what Fable can do, it's just that if I compare the two, this is one of the few definitely noticeable areas that you can easily demonstrate. Obviously, one-shotting programs is much better as a demonstration of a model's capabilities than it is practically useful (not that it is useless, but hopefully my point is understood).

However, whatever Fable truly is better at, one thing I really like about GPT 5.6 Sol is even harder to quantify: taste. GPT 5.6 Sol outputs are still LLM outputs and they contain many things that people would probably consider "Claude-isms" for better or worse, but overall I really prefer the GPT 5.6 Sol output. I find it to be generally more tasteful. Hard to quantify, but when talking to people I've had enough people seemingly agree with me to convince me that it really is true.

Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less.

After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues.

Fable (imo) had the edge on the $200 plan, but after this 50% reduction I'd say Codex is better value by far and there's no contest.

---

Using Fable as the orchestrator and delegating tasks to Sol 5.6 Ultra via the codex plugin in Claude Code yielded good results, but still there was a lot more over-engineering (thus time and tokens spent) than Fable by itself would've done.

Both models suffer from doing-too-much. But both models are fundamentally really smart and knowledgeable. I think it's really close and pricing cuts really spice things up for us consumers! Sol is a clear winner in the value department and the $100 plan is enticing!

---

*Claude Code usage is reducing by 33% in 2 days, Wednesday August 19... cmon anthropic: clau.de/cc-50-promo

5.6 Sol is a joy to use for "daily chat" as well. Compared to earlier OpenAI models it catches and corrects its mistakes very reliably. It also seems way smarter in tuning its replies to areas I am more/less knowledgeable about (i.e. when I ask it a law question, it assumes I know as much as a toddler which is true, but on political topics it more easily throws around terminology) and including analogies. On medium thinking, it's a very good compromise between speed and quality.

Fable feels less cumbersome to work with, but it is SO DAMN ANNOYING with the refusals that I'm leaning more and more on Sol, and very much looking forward to GPT6. Just seems like Anthropic is trying their hardest to ruin their reputation and user experience.

I too switched to OpenAI after I got sick of Anthropic's constant "safety" downgrades. Sol is definitely a breath of fresh air.

> even after completing the verification program

Was it easy to complete it?

I ended up in some weird state where I can't even attempt the verification at all. Opened the Persona tab once, closed it and then it never opened ever again. It says a verification precheck failed.

Even without TAC, Sol doesn't seem to get blocked very often. Fable would downgrade to Opus if I looked at it wrong.

Fable is still the best there is. Sol close second but I find it gets way to stuck on details.

Also Opus 5 is fine if your codebase is simple.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the GPT models are much stricter in adhering to my AGENTS.md guidelines and heuristics than Claude.

I'm also in Anthropic Cyber Verification Program, but they specifically exclude Fable, just goes up to Opus 5.

I hear you on the downgrades, I'm 13/13 on downgrades, and last downgraded me to Sonnet for asking for reasoning chain.

I cancelled my subscription recently and moved to Sol. So far - it has been a great experience. The only aspect where Fable/Claude is better I feel is doing some research from the web and summarising the facts.

output token efficiency bruv. u never go wrong with it

Sol is my daily driver but there are still times I reach for Fable when Sol doesn’t cut it. Just yesterday for example, I was trying to build a self-modifying hot-reloaded agent harness in Elixir for fun and Sol just kept doing silly things like thin wrappers and unnecessary abstractions. Fable handled the task elegantly. Sol is really good as a reviewer for finding bugs due to its thoroughness however.

It's the complete opposite for me. The model might be the worst model I have ever used when compared to other models in the class. You just can't get it not to just write the most enterprise over complex over engineered solutions for every little thing you ask it to do.

It the first model to actually make me pissed off to use AI. I absolutely hate the model so much.

I don't even want to see the codebases this model is fucking up.

It might just be good at finding bugs that about it. That all I would ever use it for just because it works harder than Claude models.

Used claude since 7/2025. Switched to codex after fable got blocked. It was still 5.5 but I knew they had to come up with something. As soon as I switched, wow. It wasn't super intelligent, but it was stable. Every day it was the same performance. This consistency is definitely worth paying for.

you should check out the codex desktop app. people who've been using claude code for a long time will surely be surprised.

Yeah at this point claude is overrated, overly expensive, weird writing style (elliptical), and the worst part is the aggressive guardrails that even normal convos get interrupted, meanwhile openAI is still I would say at the normal balance, if you ask something too obvious or direct it will stop you other than that, it work flawlessly, plus, I have yet to hit the limit despite heavily using it these past weeks.

The final straw for Claude was its refusal to give me a list of the most recent rapes reported by the BBC and basic information about them (location, date, names, just things reported in mainstream media). It outright REFUSED to complete this task.

I will not be told what I can and can't do by AI and I will no longer be supporting American companies run by despicable people. GPT only gets my money right now because its so fast and cheap but I'll be back to Chinese models in no time.

sol is much better imho than Fable but i can understand if they will perform wildly different for different people with different levels of expertise aswell as different needs. I dislike fable myself it doesnt really work for me.

Sol also doesnt _really_ work but it sort of tricks me into thinking it does more convincingly :p.

cancelled my subscriptions few days ago. (was on 100$ ones, not sure if there is diff in quality for higher tiers or not.. there might be that too).

what i hate the most is that they will make any obvious mistake you do not tell them to avoid. then on the next plan to fix it, your token limit is hit at step 4/5 -_-. Both models seem incredibly good at that mostly...

for tasks outside of coding and program design i do find them quite useful. like devops crap. maybe because i hate that, i like their help there more.

Claude as a harness at all really spends too much time before giving user feedback

Its a crutch that is no longer competitive

I have a "strategy / life-coach" project, and was surprised at how much better Sol is than Fable on it, as I've found Fable to have the edge for most things for me so far. But Sol: questions were better, insight was better, it got the brief better.

Sol has held stuff for a while to do the same sort of hazard checks I assume Fable is doing, but it always releases them. I think that's the better way to handle it rather than preventing me from seeing how far I can get generating schematics to use in Minecraft. Currently: a mostly normal voxel house.

I recently tried Claude again after several months, to see if it was any better at something Codex has been struggling with…

They STILL don't have an option to "Sign in with Apple" on the website, but they do for Google??!? (and on iPhone of course)

Screw that asinine UX

(and no it wasn't better than Codex at this particular task)

It's discounted if used via OpenRouter, not the official API.

> This sure looks like a race to the bottom

Always has been. My prediction is that both OpenAI and Claude will go bust unless they deliver a killer product. And unlike scrappy startups, they have a pretty serious deadline because creditors will come a-knockin'.

There's little to no functional difference between Kimi, Qwen, Sol, Opus, etc. All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other and the real moat will be what's always been the hard part: making a good product.

If you believe https://artificialanalysis.ai/

This is basically undercutting KimiK3 and Grok 4.6 where previously utilised gad soke advantages but was a step more expensive

You do it if you can afford to do it and your competitor can't.

The lower the merrier.

It's really only between Anthropic and OpenAI for many of my use cases, since I have a Zero Data Retention agreement with both. I'm not trusting random inference providers and especially not Elmo with sensitive data.

Since when does Grok 4.6 have Sol 5.6's intelligence? I don't believe it.

That suggests this is being funded by OpenRouter, and there's no indication this is the case (and I doubt OpenRouter can afford it; why would they anyway).

> codex has reached Claude code performance in coding

Codex has always beaten claude in coding benchmarks, hasn't it?

I switched as I felt Codex was on a par with Opus, but the chat responses from Sol are just more intelligible than the word soup I've been getting from Opus. I wonder if Opus could be prompted to respond in simpler prose via agents.md

I spent $800 in a few hours when my sub maxed out because I was trying to get something done and had a long car ride to let it churn.

Their api pricing is absurdly expensive.

I am also on the pro $200 plan, the limit is high enough to do what I want for a week, and binge run Ultra Fast last day to use the remaining credits.

A billion a day? How many agents are you running?

I have mine churning like butter and I'm rarely hitting a billion tokens per day, what's your workflow look like?

I’m exclusively using ultra and I run out in 3-4 days consistently. Those resets are great but I’ve noticed they like to cluster them at the start of the cycle, would be better if they spaced them out more.

A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days.

I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd and I don't know how you can live with that. It's immoral.

I can’t sign up for that. I tried authorizing Codex a couple days ago. For some reason, their system says my phone number has been used for verification 3 times even though it definitely has not. I’ve had this phone number for over 20 years. OpenAI support is useless. They just keep repeating the policy without actually helping me.

I don’t think there’s a real answer for this. Margin depends on whatever number the accounting department wants to make up.

Do you include research and training costs? Of all models or only the ones being served? What percent of the R&D budget do you allocate to inference? What about data center capacity? Do you count future commitments? All the circular financing deals? Do you count employee equity grants as costs? At what valuation?

Or they have gotten new asics and can do now inference way cheaper

OpenAI didn't cut the price of Sol by 50% like they did with Luna's 80%. Sol was unchanged. This is just a limited promo for OpenRouter non-BYOK.

I'm pretty sure tokens are priced to maximize revenue, not inference profit.

I always find it funny that Japanese pensioners are probably subsidizing my tokens.

> my last big task was 100% Codex using Sol max (re-sizing my AWS infrastructure using CDK)

Fwiw, you could do this with any small or medium model, and it's easier with the aws-docs mcp. AWS is pretty stable, well documented, and programmatic, so most AI can figure out what it needs pretty quick

It would seem that getting lots of data is exactly the reason to discount this.

I would in such a scenario expect the GPUs to be dumped to industrial breakers who would send them to China for refurbishment and repackaging before being sold again on Amazon, AliExpress, and Taobao as last gen gaming cards from weird brands and specs.

This is what happened after the great crypto GPU dumping.

I would happily buy up a load of datacenter GPU's at deep discount

Mountains of GPUs next to the ET games in the landfill.

Well one person can use at most one bicycle at a time.

One person can use as many GPUs as they want.

I was wondering the same, and it clearly says : 50% off, aka a sale, not normal price cut.

I don't get this thread.... Really. Is it full of bots?

No because i am still losing 50% of my weekly quota using sol on high.

It just looks like OpenRouter is doing a 50% sale on some models right now? Until OpenAI makes an announcement, I would assume no.

I'm not having that experience. So far each major model update has been at least slightly better than the last, in ways I've found useful. Can't say it's perfect, or able to do exactly what I want without a decent amount of instruction/implementation/docs, but it's been useful enough to keep paying for it.

same, I have my popcorn - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-openrouter-can-be-the-next-...

The thinking traces are server-side, not exposed

They can’t decrypt the thinking traces.

Yes, and it's only for a month. This is an ad.

Which raises the question - who is subsidizing this, and why?

Right? Should we switch from direct OpenAI API integration to OpenRouter?

What's the incentive here?

Open Responses API doesn't appear to support state management (yet)

OpenRouter and the Vercel AI Gateway.

So yes, presumably a very small share of their total traffic.

> These threads seem to have become exceedingly vibes-based.

If you remember programming language discussions, they are exactly like this.

Software development is still in the leeches and bloodlettings phase.

It depends on what effort you're using etc. As an example [1] of what codex is capable of, here's hugo (written in golang) ported to TypeScript - and then a TypeScript to Rust transpiler which converts arbitrary TypeScript into Rust.

The TypeScript code which was transpiled into Rust (and is compatible with most hugo templates) runs faster than the original hugo.

[1]: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic-examples/tree/main/rust...

The transpiler is still WIP, but the fact that it can do this says a lot of about how far LLMs have come.

its over engineered problem solver ???? well because its a designed to do that

if you want to solve basic problem then use Luna

No, this is OpenAI doing the discount, not Openrouter by themselves. OpenAI is crushing it with their 5.6 models, and they probably decided there was no better time to grab as much market share as possible.

OpenRouter offers 1% discount to save your conversations, explicitly opt-in.

Anything else they don't save it. Even if they tell you the model provider saves your data for training.

Why would the potential acquisition have anything to do with this? They do discounts all the time on various models. Luna was 50% off last week..

Not sure as OpenAI models (Sol, Luna,..) are also discounted on the Vercel AI Gateway rn. My bet is on OpenAI trying to drive more enterprise customers to their models through API.

I've found it to be great for planning code changes (or new projects). I use the superpowers plug-in which I think guides the planning.

Then I switch models (to luna) before implementation. I find this combo nearly always does what I want.

I also use a skill called ponytail, its goal is to keep things terse and edits small. It may have contributed to the successes above.

I like that skills are easy to try out, too.

You would probably get better results with Luna for the real simple tasks, or Sol with low thinking effort.

I find that I get exactly the effort that I asked for, which is pretty nice. The other side of that coin is that these are the least lazy models I’ve used so far. They will go on elaborate tangents to complete the task when I want them to.

I've found it's worse for simple tasks too, and I have to give it stricter guidelines, and sometimes it doesn't follow the same patterns I've grown to expect. I've found using 5.6 (sol) is good for diagnosing issues though, especially in terms of optimization of some given path

Yep. I have not yet had a single good experience with Sol or the 5.6 models on a variety of harnesses and configurations. It overthinks, overcomplicates and often makes my code into an unmaintainable sludge. It'll usually take 5+ turns of steering to get it in the right direction.

It's your responsibility to set an appropriate level of Thinking. For simple tasks, I use the instant model. As an approximation, the choice is proportional to the amount of time I want it spending on the task. Also, you can always ask it to respond succinctly.

"rewrite unreal engine in rust, make no mistakes"

Why are you being downvoted, is this post an ad or something.