Comment by slaser79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slaser79 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the issues have been already noted here..Two "regressions" for me:

1. Communication ability. It basically now speaks almost in riddles I am asking OPUS 5 for tldrs all the time now (should skillify it now!)

2. Overengineers for edge cases. I get it. With all the benchmarking and RLing, but now tasks that would have been completed relatively quick take much longer as it overengineers all the edge cases, and sometimes ends getting lost and missing the forest from the trees (as context usage shoots up) so it is easier to get derailed.

What I have learnt now is to diversify models luckily I have all 3 subscriptions of (anthropic, openai and google).. Most of interactive pair coding was with opus but now I just use fable (when I have sufficient limits) or use gemini flash in antigravity..which actually works quite well and is underated for small / medium changes and super-fast.

Fable is much better than Opus 5 IMO but it just burns through tokens ungodly fast. I can hit my weekly Fable limit on a 20x Max account in a day.

Agreed, it feels like Fable is the higher strategic level thinker even if it's end capabilities are the same on benchmarks, it actually does the code that matters, and not creating a bunch of code that doesn't.

But tokens.......

I agree, part of me seriously wonders if Fable isn't at all burning through tokens as quickly as we think and Anthropic is just doing this to get more money from us...

It really wouldn't at all surprise me if this was the case, but it's just a hunch without evidence.

Your #2 is spot on. I have in fact said the same exact words to Opus about missing the forest for the trees.

I have it work on some code for an inhouse ClaudeCode plugin, and it starts coding as if it will be attacked by hackers who will try all sorts of variations to break it. I can appreciate that in cases of software that is public facing or accessible, but for a simple helper plugin it is overkill.

It will even admit that it is doing this when confronted, and then keep on getting lost in edge case verifications on the next turn. I feel like Opus is the person who does something a way you don't want, you tell them how you actually want it, they apologize, and then just continue doing it their way as if your input meant nothing to them.

Yeah, trying to get it to add features is sometimes _impossible_. It'll circle around and around creating all kinds of preconditions that you never asked for as excuses for why it can't do the really simple thing you asked for.

It'll also find some minor security problem and drop everything on the floor with URGENT without me asking it to.

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