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Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety.

It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI.

But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.

> That forces people to look beyond the walled garden.

Every time I get "you used your quota, come back in 3 hours, or 2 days" -> that is experimentation time with their competition, leading to changed service plans. When they said "claude -p" will be billed at API pricing even for plan users I moved my harness off claude. After I integrated codex, then it was never going to be a full claude project again.

What business encourages users to try their competition and adapt their usage to the competing products?

I'm surprised no one mentions about their recent privacy violation(s).

The breaking point for me was the privacy violation. They've been fingerprinting every request and violating users' privacy hoping no one would notice. Too bad, someone found out and that was the day when I cancelled my subscription.

https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

> They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:

The consumer side cheap monthly plans exist for the same reason companies like Cloudflare and Vercel have a free tier: When it’s cheap and easy to get developers familiar with the tools, they will push their companies to pay the real money for those tools.

It’s a hard balance with LLM serving because you can’t really make it free. $20/month is close to free, but the $200/month plans are in a difficult place where they’re big enough that many small companies pay for $200/month plans for their employees and ignore the enterprise features you get with the full expensive arrangements. So the companies are continually adjusting the $20-$200 plans to keep them from being reliable options for businesses, which is where the real money is.

There’s a short sighted cheering on of the 3rd tier and lower companies offering lower rates, but we’re already seeing them ratchet up the pricing and keep larger models closed after they get market attention.

Also, for whatever software engineering work I throw at Fable 5, Opus 5 also does fine. Apparently Fable is supposed to do better at long running tasks (in other words - burning more tokens without interacting with the user), but that's not the kind of work I'm doing.

After Fable 5 launched, it was better than Opus 4.8 for sure. Then they rug-pulled Fable from me (EU), and later released Opus 5. Now I only reach for fable when Opus 5 API returns 529 for the millionth time this year.

As Anthropic does this, OpenAI Is giving everybody resets like every other day now on Twitter.

I'm strongly considering biting the bullet and just ditching my $200/month Claude Code plan for the Codex one instead, especially because I keep running into my weekly limits (even sticking to Opus.)

I agree they’ve done a bit too many pricing / usage promotions and A/B tests.

The period was also marked with many billing bugs, like spending people’s usage credits for included Fable for a few hours (gave me a huge shock), but to their credit they refunded it.

They haven't communicated well the fact that the default model should be Sonnet 5, which should give you unlimited use for common coding tasks (say with occasional subagents use) on the Pro plan. Instead they're pushing Opus and even Fable, to try and get people addicted to the higher tier, without realizing that nearly everybody has a Sonnet for peanuts via DeepSeek V4 on OpenRouter, or completely free through Qwen 3.8 locally. I predict major trouble for Anthropic, now that OpenAI's models are closing in, are cheaper for daily use and don't have those silly 5 hours limits - and that Chinese models are getting really good and are even cheaper.

Add to that at one point Claude was the go to models for the very basic use case for LLMs - text generation.

With newer models text generation outputs have gone from probably human readable text to dense philosophical treatise about "load bearing" and incomplete sentences. So much so that now you need skills or another LLM to just parse the output. Simple answers and text generation just doesn't exist.

The problem isn't the confusion from pricing and ToS changes, but the constant feeling they don't give a fuck about their customers, and they'll fuck them up with lock-in tactics and high prices at any chance they get.

Yes, this was a bit upsetting for me. I found myself organizing my work hours and availability around perceived or actual fable quota limits / trial periods - only to find out multiple times it didn't matter, there is no seeming strategy or rhyme or reason to it. Enormously frustrating, and I did end up just settling for a while with cheaper models.

I'm not saying this with any undue derision, it's genuine - do they have a real product team or are they clauding that too? The direction makes little sense.

I think an important part is communication, so many of these issue could be fixed by saying "Hey we're seeing our utilisation go over x% over the weekdays so we need to implement "surge usage" during this period starting in 2 weeks.

Instead often it feels like they make a change, then wait for someone to figure it out. Then Anthropic ends up being reactive as opposed to proactive in communication.

It is kind of funny because surprises from OpenAI tends to be positive (Tibo resets), on the Anthropc side I dread them.

Isn't it just tipping the hand at where the actual businesses are going to end up inevitably?

The only B2C is going to be watered down ad-driven BS, and they will charge B2B via tokens.

The $50/mo - $200/mo consumer LLM subscription is not something I expect to last long / or to drive much of the revenue share... like individuals paying for Gmail vs Googles overall business.

In my case it's been kind of unhealthy, just constantly waiting for the token limit to reset, always feeling like I'm wasting a resource if I'm not using subscription right now.

I just put $30 on openrouter, switched to Pi, and I finally have a calm mind. Since I actually pay per request I want to maximize efficiency rather than utilization

Yup. It also seems like the latest and greatest is a smaller and smaller gap everytime. I will continue using the second best more affordable model until a new model comes out, everyone talks about how great it is, and the last greatest model becomes the second best and costs the same as the previous model I was using.

Opus and Sonnet 5 babble like crazy - this’ one reason. At some point one feels as if staring at the Random himself, not a conversation. Fable is super expensive.

From a cost-effective perspective the GPT models are much cheaper - one can easily tell it takes longer with GPT5.x to exhaust limits and this matters A LOT.

I can’t say which of these corpos I despise more though. I though for a while Dario was cool, but a massive distrust is piling and the first third player offering decent experience (and showing some decency) will win me over.

For the record - I’m also unsure whether I despise more Exxon or BP or burning fuel as a whole. Hope u get the point...

Not just that once I hit my Fable limit I naturally experimented with other options and realized that 5.6 Sol + Grok 4.6 gives me same quality of results as Fable + 5.6 Sol so not really that reliant on Fable anymore.

Not only that but it appears as if they're also treating the platform that customers actively use in such a way as well - heavily A/B testing features and behavior of the platform with little regard for customer comfort in terms of platform use, moving targets for subscription limits, etc etc. I suppose most of us chalk it up to the technology being new and evolving, but I'm not so sure everyone shares that same sentiment clearly.

Not just with the pricing models and avaiability, also with how the tool behaves. Currently I am fighting "auto-mode" that was introduced recently - and enabled by default without warning - and now I have to watch all the time that it does not got reenabled somehow again, depending on project and device I am developing it.

Also that the behavior of the models change, suddenly more fluff in the comments etc is annoying, but that is probably being part of using cutting edge tech.

it also feels like they are optimizing their models to output more tokens, because everyone is saying inference is profitable, they wan't to close the gap between training and inference cost by increasing output token count (which also increases input tokens in agentic use cases), with 5 min TTL, this means you almost don't have a cache

The incremental improvements seem like they are going to be pretty modest from this point.

For what it's worth, the things you describe are mostly because they're extremely short of GPUs and growth rates were absurdly high.

(Eg. They repeatedly said they'd keep fable in lower subscription plans if they had the capacity)

I stopped using Claude because of this BS. If I pay for a service, I want to know what I’m paying for, I want it to be predictable.

Anthropic have been anything but. Flip flopping on model availability, model access behind an opaque filter, their past behaviour of model degradation as they prepared their next model… these are not signs of a reliable service.

I’ve mostly settled on using a mixture of open weights models through Together.ai and Fireworks.ai, a MiniMax subscription for high-token-use tasks that don’t need the best model (for $20 I get what feels like infinite tokens), and codex for the occasional high complexity task, although with Kimi K3 and hopefully soon GLM 5.3, it’s becoming increasingly less important. Deepseek 4 flash is my cheap main with delegation to other models as needed.

I’ve also found LFM2.5 8B surprisingly useful for single-focus tasks like “does this diff touch anything that isn’t related to the task”, and it’s incredibly cheap ($0.03/0.12 per M in/out).

Not entirely sure how OpenAI is any different. Their quota system seems random to me. I can use up my quota in a single day, and the next day it gets refilled for no apparent reason. But another time, I also used up my quota in a single day, and there was no refresh; I was made to wait six more days.

To me, all of these are just exercises in getting me to pay for more tokens at API rates.

Yea, I don’t have any interest in trying Fable because I’m not interested in the BS that’s going to come with it.

I’m at the point where I need stability and predictability. I want the B- student who shows up everyday rather than the A+ student that’s unreliable.

There is a consumer unfriendly ethic behind this. Overly long answers are a cunning was to increase token cost and therefore profit. Consumers are savvy and will prohibit monopoly whilst there is still plentiful competition.

Also you don’t want to connect to the pipe and then after the fact find they’ve started diluting arsenic into it.

It also distorts the testing as it encourages non-typical behavior.

main reason is the 30days retention; not the plan changes

I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens.

Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.

OpenAI is also now actively discounting their model. They just offered a free month to users. Both companies seem spooked by what I have to imagine is slowing user growth.

Some users on HN in recent months started describing Anthropic as having become a “token merchant” and I think that moniker is quite apt.

They need to fire their growth marketer

Their truth is “we don't have compute and are working to improve capacity”

People would root for that

Instead they got people rushing to escape the permanent underclass until they have a mental health crisis just to beat the fake deadline. $100, $200, is a lot for those people

The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.

> Wait, now it's up to half your usage

It doesn't help that all their models are bow trained to waste as many tokens as possible with their extremely verbose output

The solution:

1) Set pricing tiers that do not change.

2) As models evolve, move the outdated models down the ladder, and replace the top tiers with the frontier models.

3) Give the users a warning before you do this, so they know their model is changing.

4) Sort the economic distortions out of your OPEX and reset pricing when the technology ossifies.

Is that so hard?

DeepSeek is doing pretty much the same thing they said they weren’t going to change their prices after the 75% discount for the foreseeable future. That foreseeable future turned out to be two months.

openai has been starting these shaningangs too, with "resets". i hate it. hope they wise up.

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!

>You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game

We all know that the subscription prices are not at all sustainable for these providers. You all do, right?

Yes, they're struggling to segment the market and find a way to make money, and that basically relies upon emptying the pockets of whales. As someone enjoying a hilariously subsidized Max plan, I understand that, and I don't think they're trying to scam me in some way.

And both sides of this equation understand that the market is competitive, and maybe more competitive than they thought it would be. Like, would you rather they did pull Fable when they first said they would? Or that they'd cut quota? I wouldn't. But I'm glad that Kimi K3 and GPT 5.6 Sol and the latest GLM and Qwen and...I love that this has forced Anthropic to change plans. I'm not going to hold that against them.

It’s almost like they’re trying to sell a solution looking for a problem! Startup lesson #1, don’t do that.

> Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity

I was with you until this part where the metaphor completely falls apart :p

https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...

Kimi K3 is slightly better at this. I'm using it via oh-my-pi. Can definitely sound like it's trying to be clever, but I found it less than Claude.

It’s really grating. It’s made technical analysis so tiring to read I often give up and give the output to another llm to make it readable.

It's become Oswald Bates from In Living Color:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71xxvp5R9hE

A significant percentage of what Opus 5 writes is pure padding. "The results are in, and they are load bearing". Remove the sentence and nothing is lost.

Fable is much better; still much too verbose, but at least I don't have the feeling that I am being charged for gratuitously added verbiage.

I have been changing my processes and the roles of my agents to avoid interacting with Claude Code as much as I can.

I'm with you on this. We have Claude at work and I get exhausted from using it just a bit. I've recently seen it say "let me verify the most load-bearing claims". I couldn't imagine anyone using "load-bearing", let alone "most load-bearing". Doesn't "load-bearing" alone imply "most"? I have so many questions for Anthropic about how they came up with this style.

I did a comparison between Opus 5 and Sol and the results were night and day. Basically took a feature in my app and asked it to explain to me how it works.

Sol gave me a straightforward bulleted list, easy to scan and read. Opus 5 though....it gave me a solid 7 paragraphs of how it worked. I read through it and yeah it nailed the same points Sol did but the output was way harder to read.

Yes, it’s written like a crazy LLM, and no matter what rules and where you put it, it does not follow. It comes with advantages and disadvantages. I like brainstorming with Claude than Codex/Qwen/Deepseek or others; its gregarious nature provides more colorful ideas. But implementation and review are cataclysmic with Claude. Especially Opus 5, I purposefully avoid Opus 5.

I've heard it's writing style referred to as "Claudish". I agree that it is very hard to read and creates work for me.

The writing style is extremely frustrating/maddening!

I’ve tried so many things and I have to beat Opus 5/Fable 5 over their head every time. With Opus 5, the failure to actually improve the writing is borderline comical. Both models have been building up tomes of memories on top of my core rules, all to be ignored.

Nothing sticks mid-writing! The only lever is to ask to revise after the fact, a particularly futile proposition for anything non-trivial with Opus 5.

In contrast, GPT 5.6 Sol Max absolutely obeys my edicts to write well. I selected the concise writing style and its default writing is really not bad, but tighten it up with a standing AGENTS.md order and it obeys.

The downside is that even at Max, it’s not as good as Fable or Opus 5 xhigh at writing code. Larger work and the 256k context’s forced compactions cause it to lose track/fidelity of critical details. Review passes are essential.

Another reason I’m considering leaving Anthropic are the sporadic refusals… Fable printed a Markdown body with a hex dump to inspect for trailing white space and line endings, boom, denied due to `reasoning_extraction`. Had to tell Fable to never do hex dumps. Asked it a few times “what do you think is typically done for this?”, got another `reasoning_extraction` error. It forces you to lose a whole turn of work when you have to press Esc/Esc to “retry” the last prompt… except if that prompt was mid-turn, you’re losing your entire turn.

The recent BashFirst experiment is hella nuts, where it prefers writing bash over Edit/Write tools in auto mode. WTF Anthropic?

I pity those stuck with Claude in an enterprise/work setting.

Ha! I 100% agree. Despite multiple rules in my cluade file it still talks like an insane person. I am getting irrationally frustrated at the output of these math equations.

> Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm.

As a side note, I think we are about too dismissive of computers and the Internet as “not real life”, that stuff written in text boxes by humans are just sticks and stones, etc. And now that we shouldn’t anthro-po-morphize or whatever the LLMs. But I do think, at least for some of us, that there is no way to avoid certain impacts that even non-personal text can have on us. It can feel alienating to interface with five different people in order to figure out how to solve a problem or navigate some burocracy (think Kafka). Well just interacting with one single LLM can induce that same feeling. The long-winded replies and the uncanny ways to miss the context.

Disclaimer that for my own needs I would be happy if the whole AI thing crashed and burned post-haste.

Likewise.

I really love CC and have been using it exclusively for a year now but reading Claude's verbose and semantically-obfuscated writing style is wearing me out and I'm planning to move to another provider.

I hope they fix this. It's terrible.

I've been using the Caveman plugin and it helps quite a bit.

the writing style is so easy to fix, output styles is documented in claude code and you can change it

still don’t think anthropic models are worth the money

Grok 4.6 is a delight to use in this regard, compared to Claude

I don’t think GPT is any better. I swear GPT-3 was the golden area of LLM prose. With a good fine tuning, you really couldn’t tell that an AI was writing (except for when it would devolve into utter nonsense lol)

Open weights are certainly something that is very eagerly being adopted in some companies.

It's not even that expensive because even the 15€/month/employee bill for people who use AI very little can stack up.

Beside that though, many companies already have most if not all of their data in some cloud (Microsoft would be a prime example). Giving them a few extra bugs to get a (potentially) very useful tool is not out of the ordinary.

If you are under the impression that not going AI would threaten your business right now (which may very well be true for some companies) then there isn't really a choice even if you believe the vendors will steal everything eventually (which they totally will)

That's when you do the Enterprise deal.

I have first hand knowledge of household name companies with billion euro IP who use OpenAI and Athropic products quite liberally. They have WAY more lawyers than I do and their sole job is to keep the IP safe. They wouldn't sign a deal with even a slightest whiff of the IP being used to train anything.

And if it happens, the penalty for breach of contract would have so many zeroes it'd be enough to buy a country.

> So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them.

It is a risk, but is it a big risk? If one of the big labs were to do this and get caught it would be suicidal due to the loss of confidence in them and the inevitable lawsuits that would follow for breach of contract. Given the AI labs are all desperately trying to paint themselves as Serious Businesses so that other Serious Businesses will pay loads of money for tokens the last thing they want is a rep for siphoning off sensitive customer data.

Curious what you think your organization's crown jewels actually are?

Because, almost certainly, it's not your source code.

> So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them.

This is the part that is truly scary.

Nadella the CEO of MSFT wrote that post “ A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable”

It seems to me that the unspoken assumption in that post is that no matter what happens they’re gonna be training on your data.

He’s the CEO of Microsoft, he knows how these decisions go down, he knows how the world works, he is sending a warning.

This is just recycling the same old arguments people used against cloud infrastructure. “If you host your email at Microsoft, they _will_ scan it all to get competitive advantage or sell it to your competitors.”

Did they? No, it worked out fine. Same with hosting your application at AWS instead of on owned hardware in a locked cage at the local co-lo data center.

Although of course the same argument was made against co-locating in a data center! Long ago an engineer carefully explained to me that no serious business would put their data in a co-located data center since the data center operator could just plug in a hard drive and take it all.

It turns out that contracts do actually mean things, and businesses want to do business with each long term. If you’re at a tier where Anthropic contractually commits to not train on your data, I would just sign and move on.

Still does not address ecological concerns, of course.

I’m not certain of that - I feel like the enterprise zero retention policy will be tight?

This wall of text for nothing. ZDR is a thing. Microsoft and AWS serves these models with zero data retention.

Sensible and reasonable take? Idk if everyone has set the bar so low or I'm simply this fed up, but seeing reasonable takes is certainly a breath of fresh air. Even in places such as HN which historically were filled with people who cared about security(which isn't the case anymore since you get 10 people jumping down your throat if you dare criticize the piglets sam altman or dario whatever).

"If You’re Paying for the Product, You Are the Product"

creating mvp

>Apart from the ecological issues,

Complete nothingburger. Actually worse than that, its a London Horse Manure crisis.

>Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them?

I really don't see the issue. They got slapped in the face for trying to do things the right way and torrent the lot. Why wouldn't they exercise their legal right to buy physical items and create digital backups?

>They make meth-heads look scrupulous.

My local meth head checks in on my family every 2-3 months, because when she had fled from hospital post surgery, and added some meth to some morphine, we gave her new clothes and a safe place while we convinced her that the ambulance service wasn't run by Satan. She's good people. Anyway if she wanted a whole bunch of digital books I would help her torrent them like a responsible person.

And they've hobble Fable and Opus so hard with their safety guardrails, I ask innocuous questions and tasks and they get flagged so often I gave up on it. I can get all the work I need done in GPT5.5 or 5.6 without the hassle.

I just kept a $20 plan going for use on my phone.

I kind of still chill out on Opus 4.6 too. 4.8 is good too. I go between them. Opus 4.8 is a little smarter some of the time. Their use of language is both very different from Opus 5. Some of the time I have a hard time believing Opus 5 is even related to Opus 4.6 and 4.8.

The other thing I forgot to mention about Opus 5 is that at least out of the gate, it seemed very intent on spinning up agents and obliterating my token budget. It was noticeably more token hungry than 4.8. It would make sense for them to intend this behavior.

I'm using company Claude for work with no choice what provider I use.

I did a quickie test with Fable when they were OMG TRY IT NOW, didn't see much of a difference from Opus 4.8. Except i ran into one of their stupid security guardrails. Yes I'm doing security on the software my employer owns, silly.

Then I didn't notice the US unbanned Fable after banning it, or that they extended the "trial" Fable period where it worked on fixed price plans. Not in time to bother trying again.

After that Opus 5 showed up. Language changed, okay, I don't care much. However it seems to create busywork for itself. Spawning subagents on tasks that don't do that with 4.8. Overall taking longer.

So I'm back on pinned 4.8 and doing actual work. Main problem - for Anthropic - is it's good enough.

> The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.

Where can I find these stats?

Fable is still on the $100 plan for me. (Maybe this is A/B testing or something.)

Opus 5 literally benchmarks higher than Fable

This whole article seems sort of based on a misunderstanding. Anthropic is _actively discouraging_ people from using Fable at this point. It's not a failure, they're steering people to Opus 5 intentionally.

Even if you get past these problems, those models are available only under the condition that Anthropic retains your data.

50% usage plus there seems to be a pretty big metering multiplier still. Do a relatively in-depth review of 3k LoC with Fable xhigh and poof, there goes 5% of the weekly Fable allowance. If I use their first party code-review skill that spawns a bunch of subagents—well just forget about it.

I think you need to spend more time with Sol. If you think there is nothing even close to as good as Fable - my guess is you haven’t spent as much time getting as familiar with working with those models as you have with Claude’s.

Codex is more token efficient and tends to get better results than Fable with less need for extreme token burning shenanigans like 18 hours of subagents.

I spend 10+ hours a day in both agents, typically side by side. I often have them do direct “bakeoffs” from identical prompts in separate work trees. Most of the time, Sol’s work is better than Fable’s. Not always. It’s situational. But it’s certainly not the case that Fable is in a league of its own or anything.

Either my $200 sub was getting nerfed, or you're dead wrong about nothing being as good as Fable. The only thing I found it was better at was UI design. The rest, Sol was the clear winner. Refusals, failure to follow instructions, doing 1/10th of the work and then claiming it was "finished" was my experience with Fable. For everything else, there's K3.

Did it take 18 hours because Fable is comically slow?

Sol for low level programming is consistently better, can work alone for more time, and is faster. If you think Fable is so superior, you need to work with Sol ways more.

> 2 billion tokens (mix of Opus and Fable), 24 hours

That's 1.3M tokens per minute. I suppose you mean input tokens? This would not have cost $2000 at API prices because you would have cache hits.

I like this story. How did you verify the output? How big is the codebase? Why it took 18 hours? Could you implement it with a small local agent and breaking the task down yourself in two days (i know it sounds like a loaded question, it is not).

I think the rewrites are the main story for llms in code (hot take). Writing greenfield code at the seams also something which might work well.

Like others have suggested, you should give more time to GPT models. I sometimes launch Fable with elaborate review personas, it might take 30 minutes or an hour, exceed limits, to produce a review of a PR. Then I ask the same thing GPT without any elaborate 'come up with personas, review the reviews, do rebuttals, etc', and it can find problems that hours of Fable couldn't.

the sentiment is negative and justified. anthropic nanny states what you can do.

in your instance, anthropic may decide, arbitrarily, to stop 'autonomous rebuilds / refactors and ports' because they could pose some alignment/rights/etc risk to whatever slop their philosophers dream up while they're out eating $200 avocado toasts. then you can't do the thing anymore.

fable is good, absolutely. agree it roasts Sol which is, comparatively, a little receipt-hunting jack**

but now imagine being an enterprise, and having another organization not only taking your workflows and baking it into your models, but then deciding they can arbitrarily cut you off.

when you can instead own your data, use an agnostic provider, and get better results (through model combinations), it will take 1-2 quarters to figure it out.

the main reason anthropic is killing it is because they really do understand the enterprise development experience and lifecycle and have built products and have a sales-team that can deliver.

business-model and vibes-wise they have lost all goodwill in the past 6 months, and that momentum will be quite hard to regain.

hours working on a problem is a weird metric. you could use a slower model and get those numbers way higher.

You could just write decent specs, or generate decent specs and get this done in 1/5th of the time with smaller models. Complete waste of electricity to run $500k in GPUs full throttle, if not more, for 18 hours straight to migrate from spark to pandas. Maybe try using your brain.

> There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close.

This is true, but only for certain tasks. Even as a Fable fanboi, Sol is much better at Fable for some non-programming tasks: Fable for life-planning tasks is miserable because it keeps adjudicating rules, where I've found Sol to be insightful and warm (characteristics I'd previously associated with Anthropic models).

We're probably less than a year away from all the frontier models being so good at everything for day-to-day use that it doesn't really matter which you use, which is going to seriously fuck up the business models of all of these companies except the infra companies.

> $200 plan (work pays)

so violating the TOS? Or work pays for a plan you cannot use at work?

They're expecting to IPO bigger than SpaceX later this year.

HN's take that they "kill their own company" seems wildly out of touch.

Truth is, Sam and Dario and Elon are all terrible and so are their orgs. Leaving any one of those companies for any of the others is wild.

>ZDR

Zero Data Retention, for the uninitiated readers in this thread.

The no-ZDR is clearly to permit surveillance. I would be shocked if NSA wasn't all up in these SOTA model providers' systems.

Never subscribe!

Same for me, they’re not offering it with the same data residency features of Opus, many enterprise companies can’t accept compromises.

This is the biggest factor. FT (or the analysts it cites) fumbled the ball in this article.

That's the reason at my shop. Real shame, as there's really no limit on token spend

ZDR for fable is coming, very soon.

It was in one paragraph mentioned, without much detail. But yes, I agree it is one of the largest barriers.

The same for my organization. It's explicitly forbidden in my organization because it's not available with ZDR.

While there's no linter for writing contracts, my experience (as a commercial lawyer) is that frontier LLMs are far better and error checking and far quicker at writing than the average senior lawyer. The main thing holding back further deployment (in my jurisdiction) are concerns around data residency, privilege and how fundamentally it will break an industry that is so heavily reliant on time based billing.

> There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts.

There are definitely linters and this exists https://catala-lang.org/

I have a family member that is an attorney in housing law. She claimed that LLMs are not particularly useful for her work. If she asked a simple question like, "Find all the <insert specific housing laws> for all 50 states," then she still has to go and check every single one of the laws. Since the legislature is modified so often, she cannot look at, say, Maryland's law and know if it the LLM output was the 1990, 2014, 2018, or 2026 version of the codified law. In order to fact check the law, she has to look it up, and by that point in time, she has the answer she did the work of the LLM.

> What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs.

Translation between languages.

That value dwarfs all programming value that can be had. Economically, culturally, scientifically, spiritually.

>and I suspect a decade into the future, entry level hardware will be running better models than high-end graphics cards can run now, as entry-level hardware gets better and models get more efficient.

I doubt it. The play seems to be: lock what was once commodity compute up into datacenters depriving us regular folk of it, then sell it back to us on subscription. Even if my #NeverSubscribe movement succeeds, all that misdirected hardware [into datacenters] won't likely be practical for home use.

Yep local models will be good enough for most things you need to do, in the same way as most people need a laptop not a supercomputer.

This won't happen so long as the bandwidth bottleneck is a thing. Local models are just several orders less efficient at scale, and this limitation is inherent to the architecture and won't go away unless both hardware and model structure change enormously. There are really only two usecases I can see for local models going forward:

- 10-1000 person groups such as corporations where you can amortize serious hardware with parallel use

- Porn.

I have noticed very serious degradation in performance from Anthropic. I've switched away from Opus 5, but 4.8 is still much worse than how it was before Fable came out. It's constantly making what seems like obvious mistakes... I point them out, it's constantly apologizing.

I don't know why...

Is it A/B testing?

Is it load shedding?

Is it because I'm in Canada?

Is it because I'm not on the Claude Max plan?

Is it because I'm not paying via API?

Is it because I'm not paying via Bedrock?

Is it because the U.S. is worried people are distilling?

Is it because the U.S. wants to keep the top capability to themselves?

I think open models are the future. Anthropic is killing their reputation so fast. If they don't come clean I think they're cooked.

This is yet another reason why I think local models will win in the future. They're almost certainly A/B testing all sorts of opaque stuff that people have no clue about, hence the various 'How's Claude doing this session?' popups.

So what you are paying for may vary on a day by day basis, which is quite undesirable, even if their main goal is simply to make a better model. When it comes to a tool, I'd rather have consistent mediocrity than instability.

I definitely agree. I honestly cannot do tasks that require even minor complexity. Opus 5 keeps forgetting things in context as well and coding conventions. Really cannot build with CC without Fable.

RIGHT!? The data suggests this isn't true but every fibre of my being is convinced that Opus 5 High was EXCELLENT at launch and has been lobotomised since then. My benchmark is Sol High. I've been using both consistently and either Sol High suddenly became MUCH more capable - and the data does not support that - or Opus 5 became much dumber. It's so bad I can't even use it anymore.

I'm not an expert by any means whatsoever but deploying models is not a straightforward task. There's a lot of levers to pull and I bet when models get "downgraded" to older hardware they do so WITHOUT the same stringent quality control of the output as they do when they release it.

I don't think it's something deliberately malicious like planned obsolescence but it's more like startup culture of "just make it fit in this sprint".

For me, Opus 5 mostly sucked because of its incomprehensible writing style. Having the system prompt focus on writing in terms that are easier to understand helped a bit

Which AI companies still have your good will?

Yeah, and it's no secret why they won't. Your data is the only reason they even still provide subscriptions.

They already do, extensively. Its not Shakespeare, in fact, it sucks at prose and creativity, like most newer llms.

But people are not as alike as you think. I doubt I share your unique preferences.

That said, I don't spend much time telling it how to behave. Are you sure you're not fighting the default system prompt?

This is really it for me as well. At the heights of complexity AI can do magical things. But really a lot of the time I just want it to do mundane things right. And currently it just cannot. It writes garbage text, consistently ignores something you have told it, makes mistakes a human makes once but the AI remains uncorrectable.

>Half of my work is telling claude how to behave

Dijkstra in the Foolishness of Natural Language Programming

[...] the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system.

Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do!

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

I do not agree. Fable is the only model I can leave unattended and give me results for part of my work which is just devops related tasking.

I can hand hold opus but I would rather just ask fable to do it and give me the result that I review and works. Opus will waste tokens and still require me to help nudge it in the right directions.

I think the next gen models from china will put us in a spot that the cost can plummet and I won’t need the Sota from anthropic

In a frontier scientific research environment, funding is often limited, so personal subscriptions are more common. Fable can hit a 5-hour usage limit on the Max subscription tier before it finishes a single complex math prompt. Most of the time you get one or two if you reduce context and question complexity. Most of my colleagues are cancelling their subscriptions because of that, and just using Sol instead, which is virtually unlimited on the Pro tier.

> the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research

Even fable is way below human level at many tasks. If fable were as good as you claim, all computer jobs other than "frontier scientific research" would have been replaced by now.

I thought Sol was on par with Opus, so comparing it to Fable is apples and (very expensive) oranges?

Very much agree on Fable. Over the past month or so it has shown to be the only Anthropic model that can understand a largish dbt model codebase. Opus 5 gets almost everything wrong. (High reasoning on both)

Yeah as soon as CFOs realized AI was racing to become one of the most expensive line items along with salaries and AWS bills, they started cracking down on the most expensive ones.

https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058

What if:

- Opus 4.6 was the last Opus generation that got a lot of use by Anthropic's own employees

- After that they primarily used Mythos internally

- 4.7, 4.8 and 5 were RLAIFd by Mythos "teachers"

- Hence why 4.6 is the last Opus gen who doesn't report back like a robot wanting to cover every potential hole another AI system would've spotted and criticized

- Hence why coding style in Opus 5 also gets criticized, not only behavior in CC

There's actually a tool called vomit [1] of all names to fix exactly what what is being discussed here.

[1] https://github.com/zachahn/vomit

Perhaps there is a sophisticated subtle poisoning attack that makes models behave like that?

>They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).

Option C: they could "get hacked and the models exfiltrated" plausibly. Then the horses will be out and there would be no more point for the USGov's barn door.

What did they think was going to happen when they were actively doomsday fearmongering around the release of their own model? I assume somehow they thought this would lead to a moat with them being left safely inside the castle, but this response, and Reagan's 9 Words, were always infinitely more likely. It was a demonstration of a child-like level understanding of how regulatory capture works.

The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care so much about this and they're right behind. I don't really know what the answer is.

> The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't.... They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable),

But this isn't what happened? It was only a couple of months ago! How can we be getting this completely backwards already!

Fable was aready what they were selling to the general public, and that is what the US government stopped them selling (not Mythos!)

Anthropic tuned the already existing classifier to handle the use case the government highlighted and then they went back to selling it.

They actually loosened the restrictions on ML-programming using it too.

I use Fable as much as I can and I've never had a cyber refusal for it.

in other news water is wet

this is about selling credit to clueless boomers

We're spending 225k a year on tokens. No reason not to buy the hardware necessary to run DS4 at this point.

It kind of has the personality of those students that get so stuck on one promising idea they lose sight of the problem.

I wish Fable were as good as you make it sound. A plan created by Fable is good, but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again (whether by itself, Opus, Sol etc.). That's (almost) not different from plans created by Sol, GLM 5.3 etc. The one thing where it's genuinely better is the front-end, but then again it's far from perfect, it just needs less iterations.

It works much better on regular software development e.g. for complex refactoring where cheaper models would produce a lot of garbage results.

Yeah this is a fair point. I only go to it when I have some big architectural problem I want its help in working out. Or a super nasty bug.

You have a $3 trillion bubble riding on this not being true.

I hate to be brusque but this is cope. GPT 5.6 Sol is just as good and cheaper

I think highly complex work and “professional” work are basically completely orthogonal. You can have highly complex work you do as an amateur, where AI can be very useful. For example working through a difficult mathematical problem, building or contributing to an operating systems, or researching a highly technical topic for a hobby project such as microscopy, chip design or lithography.

And you can have extremely simple work that you nevertheless have to do as a professional. For example, drafting a routine customer email, summarizing a meeting, formatting a report, filling in standard documentation, or making a trivial code change.

So I don't think the $15k workstation / professional camera analogy really holds. Those are specialized tools whose capabilities are mostly useful within a fairly narrow domain. A general-purpose AI can be useful across thousands of completely unrelated tasks, including one-off problems encountered by ordinary people.

That model costing $3/M output tokens on Openrouter is a mystery to me.

> It's also not winning on day to day work against Opus 5

In what universe? Hell, Opus 5 seems to be worse than Opus 4.6 at almost everything.

> When you actually put them to the test you see 500k tokens of reasoning with "Actually..." and "Wait..." in every third paragraph of their reasoning trace.

I've wondered if this is part of why we don't see the reasoning traces for Anthropic's models before -- Open models might just be accurately surfacing how the sausage is made.

> whether you are locked into the Ant/OAI ecosystem or not

I think the problem (for Ant/OAI) is that there is no sensible lockin or moat. LLMs are essentially interchangeable and stuff like a harness doesn't offer enough value on its own for someone to be locked into using one of them.

Now with the onslaught of the Chinese models that offer almost the same quality for much less money they have a very serious problem on how to proceed. Investors now might be looking through rose tinted glasses but their patience has its limits.

Grok 4.6 is great

> Every software engineer in my company uses Claude code heavily.

I find it funny how OpenAI got caught lacking for a very brief window, but it turned out to be a very critical turning point.

Like a guy that that's at the top of their game the entire year, and the one day they have the flu, the CEO does a surprise performance review.

A model is just another thing to plugin to a harness. I don't give it much more thought than that. If developers are still caught up on Claude Code, or Codex that's just not a long term thing. It's best to develop workflows locally and in the cloud with open harnesses. I know this will be the future because that's how it worked on every other system that developers use.

Sure there are Microslop and Oracle db users but most of the world we live in is Postgres and Linux. That's why I think most companies will run llm's like that.

the picture is now clear

I can't even ask it how to make toast without zeroing out all its memories of me.

People have realized you don't always need a Fable level model. Majority of my work is sufficient with ChatGPT Luna which has effectively unlimited usage on the $100 ChatGPT plan.

I am not doing awfully complex tasks though. I imagine a lot of other people are in a similar boat, either switching from Claude to ChatGPT or even just min-maxing DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or similar.

Isn't there a risk of getting banned if you do this (multiple accounts to bypass usage limits)?

Buy a card. Run your own. It'll be some time to optimize it, but an AMD R9700 is one of the cheapest by $/vram. Sadly, its been increasing in price slowly, and there seems to be some inventory issues, but I've switched to it exclusively. I hope to get a 2nd card to run other workloads simultaneously.

I've been running Qwen27B Q6 with 130k context at 30tps. It's not bad.

I think with an "autopilot" mode in pi, and sub agents to handle context window management better, I'd envision you could get close to unattended workflows. I haven't quite gotten that far though.

Negative is you have to do it all, and the temptation to tinker is real.

GLM 5.3 will probably do your vintage computing work without fuss.

I'd use it if I could get through a 5 hour session without exhaustion my usage limit.

Guess not! Markets shrugged it off.

I think the glib answer is, “Greed blinds all”.

Most of the people pushing this are just hoping that they can cash out before the hype pops and financial gravity crashes the party. Sam Altman recently claiming that the singularity is here is so stupid on its face he should just be treated as what he is, a huckster.

None of this stuff ever made any sense on what it was being sold initially. It was always insulting that the media and business leaders tried to argue that the tech could replace entire call centers or vast swaths of entire industries.

People keep arguing, but it will or it has based on extrapolating certain, reasonable use cases. Klarna has shut up about replacing call centers with bots because Markov chains with memory only can do so much.

Some of us want to get work done and don’t feel the need to either glorify or hypothesize about what might happen.

I’m happy with Claude. If they become (bigger) jerks, I’ll switch to something else. I don’t ha e the energy to praise Anthropic today and I won’t have the energy to demonize them tomorrow. The emotional investment people have for/against these companies feels like celebrating or being offended by the weather.

Are people flocking to them? I see people buy the products but if you ask I think they are just about as hated in the big techs.

A mixture of opportunistic edge-seeking, FUD, FOMO, novelty-seeking, the need to impress shareholders, the tendency of salespeople to believe other salespeople are telling the truth, the ever-present need to stay in front of relentless commodification, and pragmatic curiosity.

TBH I don't think any of that is unique to the IT industry's relationship with the Valley. Other technology-driven industries have a similar worship-ish relationship with a few rarified businesses. But the culture of the IPO exit accelerates all the most short-term motivations to do anything.

清冲 is "Qing chong", pronounced "Ching Chong". It's not a real word, it's just racist.