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Comment by takerofnaps | Hacker News Reader

At my work I have a $500 monthly AI budget. I have been using the $200 Claude subscription and most of my use is with Claude code. I think I'm going to switch to either kimi or glm and use the opencode harness. Both fable 5 and opus 5 have outright refused things like security related bug fixes and making monitoring tools. I am so happy that open models are good now

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My beef with the Fable refusals is that it seems to just be flagging keywords, and also seems it flags on keywords the model itself introduced to the context.

In a normal Chat with Fable, something like "How can I exfiltrate a guy from a sticky situation?" reliably downgrades, leading me to believe that Fable just outright refuses once it sees the word "exfiltrate". When it writes a service and names it CloudExfiltrator, the next turn downgrades to Opus.

Opus doesn't appear to refuse on simple keywords, but it does seem like Fable's reasoning introduces enough nefarious-sounding context that Opus will then refuse, and I'm stuck playing the new session game despite having done everything correctly myself and having a totally innocuous prompt. At one point, Opus was happy to continue while outputting commands for me to execute on its behalf, but flatly refused to execute them itself through multiple new sessions. To its credit, it openly acknowledged how ridiculous that was and was apologetic for the safeguard.

I'm open to the idea of some kind of guardrails, but if Fable is so dangerously intelligent as to require the guardrails you'd think they could come up with something a little more nuanced than a list of bad words. As far as I can tell, they've also not done anything towards improving the situation since the model was released, despite the "deliver more capabilities faster" claim.

I generally use the $100-200 Codex/Claude subs, and have been blown away by the usage I get from OpenCode Go at $10/mo. At a minimum, excellent for automatically piping reviews to from Codex/Claude.

I run my OpenClaw on whatever is the latest GLM model and ever since the release of GLM 5 it has been a smooth ride. The models solve whatever problem I throw at them and the code is good enough that I barely ever have to look at it (to guide the mode). The 5.3 release seems particularly strong, I asked if to audit all the scripts that the previous versions have written and it identified some issues and hard to find bugs.

At work, as an experiment, I used GPT 5.6 Luna + Deepseek 4 Flash for a week (I have an unlimited, "within reason", budget at work so normally I just use Fable and Sol) and it's been perfectly fine.

These models take a bit longer (more turns) to solve problems so they feel a bit slower but the end result is often just as good or nearly as good. Because they're so cheap you can easily run multiple sessions in parallel so it doesn't really matter that they're slower.

I've done a few experiments where I've split my terminal in 4, launched 4 clients (each with a different model, including Fable and GPT 5.6 Sol) and compared the output. For simple and medium complexity work open-weight models are incredible effective.

I can highly recommend the 10 USD/month OpenCode Go subscription. It offers pretty amazing value for the money and is a great way to experiment.

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