Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

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821 pointsnaves701 comments

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable.

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:

"You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks" "Wait, now it's up to half your usage" "Ok, now its..."

Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second.

That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.

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.

As soon as I started using Fable I was like, okay, this is probably as good a model as I will need for software engineering going forward. I still feel that way. I don’t need a better model, I need a faster Fable.

The thing I miss most about programming is flow, and the constant bouncing between terminal tabs sucks. I’d love to do one thing at a time, with Fable, quickly.

remember 4 year ago we use to : have stack overflow open, documentation, obscure forums plus other tabs.

An ide open with 20 tabs open each file a component, a class or an interface We also use to hold entire codebases in our brain.

And now I'm getting 10-20x as much done. I'd say the trade off is worth it.

I'm struggling to scale myself even further. This tech is unreal and I have so many things I can do.

For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again. Everything is greenfield and exciting and big tech is struggling to figure out what to do about it.

People are just hacking all kinds of stuff, and it's awesome. Feels like techno utopia.

I have mixed feelings.

The barrier and time between idea and usable implementation is almost zero now. I don't have to imagine. I can just write something and see it work before making larger decisions. I really like this. Many of my ideas were abandoned because I needed to study some obscure library. Now, I can learn the parts that I find interesting and just have the AI chew through the grunt parts easily. That's the good.

I started coding with a line editor on a small Casio handheld "computer" and used to keep programs in my head. I more or less knew what happened on each line without seeing the line. With larger programs, I had a mental model of what was going on where and a big part of the input to that was the effort of writing everything by hand. That's gone. It's not really important as far as the output of usable programs is concerned but there's a certain feeling of satisfaction that came with digesting a larger codebase and having it surrender it's secrets to you that's missing.

> For the first time, tech feels like the 90's-00's again.

It feels like the opposite of 90s - 00s: they were filled with periods where a person could self-study technology and get a job using those skills that few others had.

Where we are going (according to the AI-proponents) is children being able to replace you.

In brief; the 90s - 00s were a skill-valuation time, now we are looking at a skill devaluation time.

Unless you meant to say "Just like how any kid who could write broken HTML t put up a webpage could pretend to be a skilled professional, that's where we are now"...

We used to get paid to code now we think we need to pay a subscription fee just to write software. They push marketing campaigns saying Manual coding no more, just vibe code, gain 10x speed for $100.

Then they hit you with hourly and weekly limits, you are wondering when you are going to get cut off. Since LLM at probabilistic it often feels like pulling the lever of a slot machine, hoping our prompt is the jackpot. To make sure we win, we come up with systems, convoluted agents, context pipelines, rags to load . It feels like it's working, then bam you reach weekly limits.

(Just pay more if you want to keep winning).

I think developers need to wake up.

I myself started to use AI like a fancy debugger ,explainer. I make it walk me though every single line of code it writes.

I notice that i run into limits less, if i get cutoff, i can still make changes

I've seen this exact comment what feels like twice a day for the last 2 years, and not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.

I dislike these comments just as much. What do you want people to show you? Most of us work on projects for other people where tasks that used to take a week take a day or less. It’s also a no true Scotsman as nothing we could show would be “good enough” because it’s just the same software engineering as before but faster.

But for instance I used to work in 1-2 client projects at a time and they take months now I can do 4-5 at once and they take a month. That’s a huge improvement

The issue is that the amount of useful software written—or more broadly, the value, or even profits, businesses are making—hasn't increased in any measurable way.

I don't dispute that your tasks are taking less time, but I suspect that to be temporary. This is a forum of AI frontrunners and early adopters, so I expect it's a matter until people catch on, and recalibrate their expectations for amount of output a programmer can produce in a given timeframe.

What I dispute is that this increased output amounts to actual value. There may very well be a HN-wide 10x productivity boost, if HN measures productivity in Jira tickets per day. But if that's the only measurable result, we should expect the only long term change to be a 10x increase in Jira tickets once orgs catch on.

Piling on to the other responses, I don't really want to see anything at all from you. What I want to see to believe that any meaningful number of people out there are generating 10x the value they used to is a visibly more valuable world.

My skepticism is we're not getting that because the world mostly doesn't need more software and it doesn't need all software to be ultra-personalized to each user, either. There are plenty of valuable problems that may be solved via computation, but thus far, it seems we're getting the software equivalent of movie theaters disappearing and being replaced with people watching TikTok from bed. It re-routes the monetary value extraction from consumers of audio-visual entertainment, and TikTok probably has at bare minimum 1000x the content-length of the Criterion Collection, but it isn't making the world 10x better for anyone but the owners of TikTok.

It reminds me of my best friend from college, who was bipolar. His goal in life was to become a writer and he eventually did become an Emmy winner, but back in school, he's go into manic episodes in which he'd stay up all night five nights in a rows and churn out thousands upon thousands of pages of free-form text that incorporate prose, poetry, play scripts. It was definitely more than 10x the output of a non-manic period, and there were nuggets here and there of intensely evocative single phrases, snippets of dialogue that looked like they could come from a more compelling story, but they were ultimately sketches and drafts, not anything publishable that another person would want to read.

Would we call him 10x as productive when he was writing more total output as measured by number of words or when we was writing much less but in a form that millions of other people enjoyed and remembered?

If we purely mean economic productivity, that is pretty straightforward in a case like yours. If you were previously completing 4 projects every 3 months and now you're completing 42 every 3 months, are you earning 14x as much money as you used to?

> not once have I seen the person making it back it up and show something even remotely impressive.

heh this is funny because this reaction was all the rage in the 90s early 00s too. You'd put together something you thought was cool and then post a link on a forum only to be told how it wasn't even "remotely impressive". I'm glad people didn't give up back then and i hope no one gives up now.

Software is pretty shit these days, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. Definitely doesn't feel like a utopia to me.

i still do :)

Right, instead of having 20+ tmux panes with docs, specs and whatever, I just have 20+ tmux panes with various Codex sessions for various purposes instead, some of them been idling for days now, waiting for me to come back.

Things just moved up on the abstraction-ladder, but it's still there, hidden beneath all the TUI sessions instead.

Yeah StackOverflow which was either telling you to use google or it was so specific, that no one wanted/could respond.

Even a year ago when i was trying to do a hugo template manually with the help of the documentatin /tutorial, it was shit. The LLM at that time, was better helping me than the documentation.

But it worked and it was so useful that LLM companies siphoned their data. It was how i learned programming

I personally do not remember this time of Stack Overflow.

I had some helpful people helping me on IRC / Quakenet.

But the hugo example i found very interesting because it was the latest hugo ducumentation and I don't think I was able to find a tutorial. I tried it without an LLM first.

I _still_ haven't actually been able to _use_ Fable at all. Those safeguards just refuse biology in general.

It changed for the better a few weeks ago. Obviously it depends on what one is doing but I haven’t had an issue with my biology related material since that update

I have lower standards than you: I pay for deepseek-v4-flash-0731 tokens from a fast and reliable US vendor and I feel like working on one task at a time is fast and gets almost everything done I need.

My wife's startup made the mistake of building her internal operations around Claude Team.

Then she hired a VA in the Philippines. Anthropic promptly banned her account without warning once the VA connected to the account. It took her weeks to get her account reinstated, at which point she had already moved on to OpenAI.

How many big tech companies let you talk to a human to get support. Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

How can small companies with 1000x less money able to provide live support, but if you pay 20, 100, 200 dollars for a subscription you dont have a phone number to call ?

I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

You message support, some real person reads and gets back to you within a day.

> I think about 10% of my SaaS company is in the support department, no outsourced support at all. We have about 50k paying customers.

What your your company do? Is it low ticket business or a high ticket business?

I work with music streaming, I don't really know how to judge what is low-ticket vs high-ticket. However it is a medium-to-high margin business.

Our free tier is time-limited but we still look at all tickets even from non-paying customers (in the hopes of converting them). A 1-hour intervention from a customer rep can result in a multi-year paying customer.

Part of it is scale. If you have a small number of clients/users it is possible to provide that support. If you have millions or billions of users then you can't scale the support to handle the support requests, so some form of automation becomes inevitable.

That's not scale, Its profit margins.

If firms had a base degree of customer support they were expected to provide, they would still exist. They would just not be as profitable, but customers would be better off.

I seem to remember there was a time when S/W was also designed with the aim to be easy to use, so that the need for support was reduced. It feels like the lesson learned was to keep costs low, not to ensure users were ok.

It depends more on revenues per customer.

If you scale up customers, you scale up support. If you don't want to serve new customers, tell them to take their business elsewhere. But if you want to be a big boy, you need to play like you are one.

But how else can they get an edge over any possible competition so that they can grow faster? Quarterly reports are coming faster and faster!

> you scale up support

you'd end up with a call center larger than most cities. It's not feasible.

If your maximum addressable market is “the whole economy,” as seen in SpaceX filings, then a city-sized call centre (distributed, of course) really is ‘t that much of an ask.

If you think you hit a limit where you can't support any new customer anymore, you just tell them you have no capacity at the moment. Like any normal practice does.

What's the support staff required for a few billion people?

Their problem, not ours.

And yet, building city-sized datacenters is somehow totally doable.

So you overextend, such that the quality of your support suffers? You can just call it what it is: greed. Have you considered that maybe a company shouldn’t have millions or billions of users? That’s a lot of eggs to put in one basket.

You mean like Microsoft, Google (GMail, YouTube, Android), Apple, Facebook, and others?

Sorry, you can't buy an iPhone because Apple has got too many customers.

Sorry, you can't have a GMail account because Google has too many customers.

None of those things sound terrible. I’d argue the world would be better off. The only real losers are those companies you mentioned :shrug:

All of it is greed. 100%.

If you could be profitable with 50 customers providing excellent support, you can be MORE profitable spreading that excellent support across a larger customer base.

Just because none of the big corpos choose to do this does not mean it isn't possible. It's JUST greed.

>Automation is wonderful to cut cost for them but for the users being unable to get support is a horrible experience. But you cannot go elsewhere because they are the only player in town.

I can't tell you how many times I've experienced this with comcast. The last time I had to deal with it, was when I bought a new cable modem. I call in to provision it, the automated system assumes I have one of their modems and fails. For some reason I can't get technical support on the line and finally I resort to yelling 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally get someone on the phone.

The guy was able to solve the issue in 5 minutes flat. The problem with automation is it's only ever going to be able to handle the 'happy path'

It feels so degrading talking to the bot. Last time I did it I was trying to upgrade my service to take advantage of a 2.5GbE modem I bought and I almost said screw it because it was so frustrating with the long pauses after everything I said!

The company solves the happy path every time. Your problem is they are solving their happy path which is profit optimization. The system is not poorly designed, it is working as intended.

The solution here is removing corporate monopolies and political power.

Threaten to sue the company. The bots will connect you to a human lickety split.

Vanguard does get some support right as they tier their support based on how much you're worth. Businesses need to focus on Lifetime Value of their customers and realize that some of their marketing budget would be better spent in support.

A lot of companies seem to want to lock in to one solution or the other - like picking Oracle or SQL Server. The landscape is far too unsettled for that imo.

Misread as "infernal operations" which made it fun.

This is why I re-did the AI operating system I originally placed in Claude. For my 2.0 version I pulled it into OpenClaw (then eventually migrated to Hermes). All our work can be preserved after we change the model, even at a moment's notice or temporarily.

Right now we're using OpenAI's models by default since (unlike Anthropic) will allow us to use our pro subscription rather than token metering, but I've already had the joy of being able to change it to Kimi K3 (via OpenRouter) for an hour to try it out, and there were zero hiccups.

Hermes is the way to go. Accounts provided by the frontier labs are just too volatile.

we have 7 coworkers we have been trying to re-instate for nearly 4 months now. All using the same google workspace sso, so there really was no special reason to ban them...

I used Fable a bit when it was available. I didn't get the senae is was dramatically better than OpenAI. Now I am considering canceling my Claude sub since I can no longer experiment with their best models.

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 are fumbling the bag hard. AI's utility is for general purpose. The floor is rapidly improving from below them. With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff. Meanwhile Claude is only for occasional super hard tech problems which are rapidly improving with being solvable easily by Sol. So what's the value add?

Their disrespect for their users is also another problem. You only get one shot to make a good impression.

> With chatgpt I'm uploading all my day to day stuff.

Same, it's been a while since I logged into Claude web.

ChatGPT web usage being separate from Codex usage limit is a nice touch unlike Claude.

If I got cut off from asking chatgpt what the status of a spreadsheet is for handling my personal bills due to my rate limit from coding work I would not be coding on it at all. Glad someone over there realized this obvious fact.

I'd go further and say chatgpt offering continuing service just with degraded model keeps me in their 'free web use' tier. I have API keys for coding stuff, but for most of my day to day use of public llm, I know I won't get 'blocked' using ChatGPT. Yes, the model may change, and I'll get 'worse' output, but usually I can't tell the difference. Using Claude for day to day stuff, I get completely locked out after so many hours. Again, I have API keys for Claude as well, and use it for 'pro' work, but day to day chat stuff... it's not my daily driver.

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.

Dario said in an interview that they originally wanted to be an enterprise only company.

What changed their mind?

I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.

(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)

To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.

I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).

Free tier Gemini is good enough for my personal projects and hopefully a local model can replace it before i ever personally pay for a single token from anyone.

Work can pay a Claude sub. At home i see no need

local models are getting pretty close. they still require some serious hardware to run at a reasonable rate but they're about smart enough to be useful.

Yeah i just don't have the hardware to run them at a reasonable rate and am not ready to invest that much at today's prices. My tinkering with DeepSeek last year was promising but the minutes-per-response made it unusable.

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 ditched Claude Code $200/month a couple of months ago in favor of Codex $200/month. The value is night and day.

1. No 5 hour usage limit

2. Weekly usage gets reset CONSTANTLY. It's crazy. The longest I've ever seen it go without a reset is maybe 5 days?

3. I don't feel like OpenAI is constantly trying to fuck with me. Unlike Anthropic. I would way rather have Sol all day every data, consistently, than a slightly better Fable for like, 1 prompt every 5 hours, and only when Anthropic decides to not treat me like a cyber criminal. Believe in yourself as much as Claude believes your CRUD app is going to hack the pentagon.

4. Getting access to image generation, though I don't use it too much, is a nice perk compared to Anthropic.

edit: Should mention that I had like 4 banked manual resets as well. It feels like OpenAI wants me to use their product, whereas Anthropic wants my money while giving me a nerfed experience

>I would way rather have Sol all day every data, consistently, than a slightly better Fable for like, 1 prompt every 5 hours, and only when Anthropic decides to not treat me like a cyber criminal.

I have used Fable heavily on the lower Max plan and you are really exaggerating the limits here. I've had many multi-hour sessions with Fable on Max.

Maybe you use AI differently than me

What are you doing that uses the entire Fable credits so quickly? Genuine question.

>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.

Do you have actual data on the marginal costs of inferencing, or are you using the term 'subsedizing' loosely as in 'discount', meaning a lower price compared to another price for the same offer?

Look up the burn rate for OpenAI and Anthropic. Despite the fact that these companies have managed to hook a lot of F500 companies into paying millions for token-level API pricing, they are bleeding cash at a catastrophic rate. And we know subscription tokens come at about a 1/30th the cost of the API pricing (presuming you use your quota).

Yes, they are most certainly subsidizing the subscription plans. I mean, at least for people who utilize them to the quota.

The question is specifically about the marginal cost of the inferencing part exclusively. Not the R&D spend. AFAIK, there has never been a statement on that from neither OpenAI nor Anthropic. What it actually costs to serve one more token determines wether it is "subsidized" at a certain price point. That it is sold for more elsewhere is not evidence.

How would that number help at all or change the discussion? Is R&D not a real expense?

I mean, this argument would have merit if they built something that they're going to monetize for decades, but cutting edge models now grow obsolete in a 6 month time window.

There is zero financial analysis where they aren't massively subsidizing the subscriptions, and people have to invent ignorant "oh just ignore most of the cost of providing the product" to try to pretend there is.

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.

Where is the free month offer going on? Are you talking about usage resets?

he probably canceled his subscription and they offered him a free month as a result

Might just be preparation for their IPOs.

But the agentic layer is being worked on, agents will start consuming more and more tokens

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.

Yes, I feel like you can just sense the garbage coming. Age/identity verification, mandatory data sharing, morality policing, "Answer Engine Optimization" ads and influence peddling... it's going to be so painful to watch it all enshittify.

OP made the "electricity" analogy, and that's really all people want. I want to plug something into the wall and have it work. I don't want to have to worry that my electric company is going to rug-pull me because I plugged the wrong appliance in, or I didn't agree to some TOS, or I used the electricity to run grow lights for my pot farm, or this or that or the other.

The analogy is apt because I feel this is exactly what keeps Anthropic and OpenAI's owners up at night -- becoming the utility company the People want them to be. Ironically their behavior may accelerate their fears. And yes, the so-called safety features are ridiculously invasive and the worst is agreeing to have surveillance cameras installed in every room that occasionally detect any attempt to grow plants with LED strips as a pot farm. After a false alarm of almost having my ChatGPT account terminated for cybersecurity abuse and appeals auto-denied twice (I did nothing even close to hacking), I have started doing everything I can to decrease switching costs and thus the bargaining power of the suppliers and I'm doing the same for my company.

Basically I want most companies to be selling basic, reliable commodities. I don't want their stupid value-add or lock-in. I don't want my electric company to sell me "MyElectric+, a subscription service that lets me (and them) enable and disable my appliances from the cloud and share my meter readings with friends." Just get the "electricity" part right, and I'm good. I don't want my water company to sell me "MyWater+, a subscription service that lets me (and them) flavor and carbonate my water with an advanced cloud service that...blah...blah...blah..." Just stop! Fire all your idea guys and just supply the base product. Hell, I'd be happy with a phone that no apps pre-installed. Look at phones today, so much built-in uninstallable crapware that it would make Gateway in the 90's jealous.

People need to understand this took decades of regulation, lawsuits, and political action to make electricity as nice as it is.

With Sol OpenAI is more like the A student, and Astra seems like it will be the S-tier student if the rumors are true.

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

If they actually became a token merchant it'd be amazing. But they didn't. They tried to hide the chain of thoughts tokens. They banned accounts for using third-party harnesses with Claude subscription. Their tokens are also not very at a very competitive price.

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

> 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.

> 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.

Sorry, but people are cheering on Chinese companies (of whom your are unduly dismissive with your '3rd rate' comment given how good GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 are) not only because they are more economical, but also because they do not constantly refuse to do legitimate tasks and provide you with the weights for self hosting these models.

I feel like many VC driven companies have completely forgotten how to compete on basic value for product and instead tie themselves into knots with meta-competitiveness games.

"We have the smartest model in the world but our company consistently does stupid things" is not a sustainable business model.

Maybe Anthropic's enterprise sales are going brilliantly, and the rest of us are just pixel dust to them.

Still. Brand perception is a thing, and between rug-pull usage policies, weirding verbedly output quality, and "I'm sorry Dave I can't do that" pushback, Anthropic are clearly having strategy issues.

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

> 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?

>™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.

I guess this is why they're pushing Claude code hard (not supporting agents.md, not allowing third party harnesses, etc) but when switching to another provider is as easy as opening a new terminal and typing omp/pi/codex your moat is effectively zero.

They can compete on price, quality or value but anything else is just madness. Currently they (arguably) own quality but this won't last.

It drove me to setup Qwen 3.8 this weekend. I couldn't see the value in just giving them money for a higher tier plan instead.

I've never run a local LLM model before. Certainly won't take as long to iterate on this.

Qwen 3.8 is excellent. With the right harness, it does about 95% of what Opus can do, in my case automation software development. Since 3.8 came out, I have significantly revised my expectations for a local model. Give it another year or two, and we'll be running fast and free local models for nearly everything that matters, and these costly subscriptions will be a thing of the past. I've always believed that AI should be free for everybody, like TV and radio. We're almost there.

What harness would you recommend? I’ve tried Pi but the model struggled to stay on track after the compaction.

I have only 48gb of ram, so can fit only 80k context max, so good compaction is must.

I am running it on 32GB and I did not saw model loosing it context even after 4-5 compactions in pi. I am running sessions for few days sometimes. I think it looped once, but loop police extension stopped it. The only problem I have know is how pi compaction works, which is forcing full prefill which takes time and it is erroring a lot. I wrote my own compaction that should remove full prefil but it does not work. But this is the only problem with this setup and it is more problem with pi then the model. I much more prefer it to use Qwen then paid models: Claude forces me to do reauth every other day and codex models either are too costly or not capable enough.

Free tv and radio? Where do you live? Where I live you either pay taxes for it, alternatively, it is so ad infested that it is not possible to watch it.

I suspect the same will/is happening with AI. Either you will pay for it, or it will be so ad infested that it will become useless.

The claude -p thing was doubly stupid because they quietly allowed it again a couple of weeks later, so they pissed off developers for nothing

Wait, it's allowed again? Completely missed that. Been avoiding to use it and trying to find workarounds, not great.

I can't find the page now but yes they quietly "paused" the June 15th rollout of API pricing for -p headless. Presumably to come back again one day.

I think they didn't even bother making a separate post about their backpedaling, they just slapped some disclaimers onto the existing page:

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

Update June 15: We're pausing the changes to Claude Agent SDK usage described below. For now, nothing has changed: Claude Agent SDK, claude -p, and third-party app usage still draw from your subscription's usage limits. The previously announced monthly credit, which would have been available to eligible claimants in connection with these changes, isn't available. We’re working to update the plan to better support how users build with Claude subscriptions. When we have an update, we'll share it before anything takes effect.

Yes, they sent an email about it. You can also use the Claude SDK with an OAuth token ("claude setup-token" output) and it counts against the regular limit. Maybe they were afraid of losing users dependent on ACP (Zed editor and other compatible tools), since Claude Code does not have native ACP support and integrates only through the SDK?

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

They are high on their own supply. The people running these companies are delusional imbeciles who have been placed in charge of billions of dollars.

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

If you are selling something, and losing $10 on each sale, you also would want to limit how much you sell.

I mean, sure, you are losing money on each sale so you can landgrab, but you still have to balance the land-grabbing with how much money you can actually lose.

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...

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

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.

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.

Sonnet 5 is a trash model and stupidly expensive if you accidentally set reasoning tokens high - more expensive than fable - it absolutely should not be the default lmao. If the common coding tasks you use ai for is doable with sonnet or local qwen - you're either not using Claude code (if you are, you'll very quickly see that sonnet 5 in Claude code is not a model for "occasional subagent use" - spinning up subagents is the only thing it's good at and it does it way too much. It can spin up subagents and waste huge amounts of tokens but it can't write good code lol.) or you've got Claude code workflow that is very human in the loop where you are significantly steering and controlling the models. And in that case your default should be to use gpt. Claude models are stupid slow.

Yeah Opus 5 on low is faster, cheaper, and better than Sonnet 5 on high...

> 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Like many things that "nobody's talking about", people really are talking about it. Discussion from two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

I spend way too much time in all the LLM related subs, to the point that i consider it unhealthy (inc claude/anthropic subs).

Its in my opinion not wide spread at all and as today is literally the first time i ever hear anybody mention this.

No, that was the very first time that article was submitted to HN. That's not called "talking about" it. Talking about it means highlighting this enough in discussions so users really know their privacy is being compromised. I have more respect for AI companies that openly talk about selling user data than the ones pretending to be privacy heroes while doing the opposite.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Fable was really excellent before the whole fiasco with the US government. Once they brought it back it was not the same at all. I have switched over to ChatGPT now for most things, its answers are way better than Fable in my experience. I still use Opus 5 for purely coding tasks.

This is why I think open weight models will win out in the end. Right now there’s too much going on behind the scenes with the models. Day to day you never know if you’re going to get smart Claude or dumb Claude.

that part is extremely frustrating, I can't tell if it's a placebo or if the model quality does actually vary. the uncertainty makes me more hesitant to rely on it heavily as some days it just seems incredibly dumb to the point of being useless.

For browser game generation, Fable 5 consistently produces much better game prompts and playable 2D or 3D prototypes than Opus 5 (based on 500+ prototypes I created using different models). It has a much better grasp of how visual elements work together and implementing game mechanics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If they can make a business like that, yes. But with how rapidly the competition is catching up, I'm not sure that's a viable strategy.

This is the key point. Trust is earned and being anti consumer or opaque with pricing or terms doesn't bode well for arr or repeated usage.

The whole fable thing really did the company a number. Their filters are incredibly sensitive now and I got banned for bootstrapping a react app. 13 days and still no response, and they haven't even refunded the subscription as the FAQ says they should have. Their support system is designed around using your account to contact support, and if you are banned you cannot. How are you supposed to build trust around that. The last half year has been more and more haphazard.

They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.

But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.

So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.

Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.

Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.

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 had Fable bail on me because I used the word autopilot on a project. Changed to something unrelated, and off we went.

I haven’t hit the Fable guardrails a single time after substantial usage. And I’m working on a ML project (a game AI).

I don’t doubt people are hitting it… shrugs

Yeah same. Multiple 20x max accounts, I typically hit > 50% of the fable usage limit on eace, literally never seen a guardrail. Maybe I’m boring? Maybe they have some kind of account reputation system?

I hit it once when I asked a question about whether butterflies remember anything from their time as caterpillars. I've never hit it for coding, but I also don't really do much related to security.

Doesn't it silently downgrade to Opus for ML work?

You are saying it could say "Fable" in the model description (e.g. bottom left of TUI for Claude Code) when it is secretly Opus?

That would be absolutely insane... I don't think it's doing that?

It appears they rolled it back, but yes that is how it initially worked.

https://readysolutions.ai/blog/2026-06-10-claude-fable-5-sil...

They also made Fable no longer ZDR for businesses which killed tons of demand for it.

what could be the rationale for that...?

They want to be able to zoom in and zoom out as needed while analyzing aggregated user requests to better understand the different kinds of ways (well-resourced) actors use to distill their most capable models.

> "The data will help us defend against complex and novel attacks (including new jailbreaks and attacks that operate across many requests) as well as help us identify and reduce false positives."

From: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5

> "Some attacks only become visible across multiple requests. Best-of-N jailbreaking, for example, sends hundreds of slight variations of a prompt in the hope that one will work. Larger patterns of misuse, such as state-sponsored espionage or data extortion campaigns, only surface when our safeguards classifiers can zoom out across many requests. Detecting these threats requires temporarily retaining prompts and outputs so they can be analyzed together, rather than one at a time."

From: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15425996-data-retenti...

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.

I'm going to be sad when they retire 4.6. It's not my daily driver but it's still my go-to when the other models are being stupid in one way or another (either being too verbose, or lecturing me about how what I'm asking for is evil and bad).

I tested all recent Opus versions and 4.6 and 4.7 were both fine FWIW. Seems 4.8 is when something started to go wrong.

That seems about right. 4.8 is like in between 4.6 and 5 in terms of capability and language and they are all pretty close honestly. I just default to using Opus 5 for a coding agent that I don't interact with and I like driving with Opus 4.6 or Fable. Fable thinks too much though. Fable is like that engineer on your team that will over-engineer the shit out of something if you let them. Fable was like, "Here are 34 yaks, which shall we shave first <hands rubbing together>" and I was like can't we just... write the script first and then decide of any of these poor yaks need shaving?

Hah! I was so surprised to get that "lecturing" behavior from Opus 5 too, I didn't know it was more common.

Can you give an example? It's a bit entertaining to read this given all the years long (and still ongoing) posturing about LLM sycophancy (not that all of these couldn't be true at the same time).

Example: https://gist.github.com/DavidBuchanan314/14ad6977ac3b45af746...

(yes, it was a very lazy prompt I could easily have googled, but that makes the refusal even more bewildering)

4.6 has been most reliable model for me to get readable text out.

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.

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.

Non-LLM user here. Why? Apart from the ecological issues, I'm very uncomfortable giving my organisation's crown jewels to {random_internet__corp}. Look at the lengths they go to for training data - 10M for Spirit's call logs? Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them? They make meth-heads look scrupulous.

Your prompts, especially if they contain your entire codebase, are _way_ more data-rich than an airline phone call or 1920's novel. So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them. Which is both a commercial risk and a massive new attack surface.

It's not just software developers; if law firms aren't controlling any public LLM prompts _very_ carefully, they can expect some meaty client confidentiality suits. In fact any organisation in a competitive environment should be worried: Acme Bolts: "Write me a presentation for Zoom Construction". Beta Bolts: "Is Acme Bolts pitching to Zoom Construction?"

Maybe this is part of why OpenAI and Anthropic are finding demand softer than they would like. And why open-weight models that organisations can run on exclusive hardware are thriving.

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

> I guess Meta does have reasons to be quite jealous at this point.

Yep, all they've got to train on are bot-generated Instagram posts. Can't say I pity them, though.

> 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.

I read it quite differently.

The frontier labs can have the models but without being where the workers are they cannot do much, lots of industries have strict requirements of not sending their data over to randos in the internet.

Microsoft and Google have the upper hand here with their workspace offerings and could easily position themselves as secure enclaves where you can use local LLMs where your data never leave your premises and is never used for training.

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)

>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.

"Doing things the right way" lol ... I mean, I am fine with it, if for now and ever after we are all free to "do it the right way with torrents". But some are more equal than others in this world, so naturally even if this was tolerated, it would not extend to us and our freedoms.

>"Doing things the right way" lol ... I mean, I am fine with it, if for now and ever after we are all free to "do it the right way with torrents". But some are more equal than others in this world, so naturally even if this was tolerated, it would not extend to us and our freedoms

I find this argument weird because you or I are below the threshold of being targeted over book torrents these days.

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

Once a thief, always a thief. I would not trust them to not have the communications buried deep in some log files in cold storage, to be digested when suitable.

I don’t think any corporation would do anything to trigger the lawyers from MS / Google / Apple etc all at once.

I think the lure to have/keep an edge at all costs to keep those stock prices high is too big to ignore. They can then pick up costs after series of trials down the line, money and bonuses are now.

MS ain't some altruistic company having core mission the good of humanity, as they proven across decades.

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.

> Although the LLM providers state that they will not use your data for training when you sign an enterprise deal

It can be very hard to prove in court that your data was used for training

Not really, that’s what discovery is for. You just ask Anthropic and OpenAI to hand over every internal document and message that contains your companies name, or matches any reasonable query about where training data comes from.

It very hard for a company to do anything without leaving some kind of paper trail behind that can be discovered in court. Not without crippling their own operations by simply refusing to digitise or write down anything.

Lots of companies filled with people working very hard to obscure their shady practices have been hoisted by their own internal docs. Just look at any major Uber, Google, Apple, Microsoft lawsuit. Do really think Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna be better at destroying their paper trail before the lawsuit starts?

Fair point!

If it happened and you get to court, it's probably fairly simple to prove in court (subpoena, discovery, etc). It's not like training will happen only once and then they'll delete the data and all references to it. When training models, you want to have a full lineage of how you obtained it.

> it's probably fairly simple to prove in court (subpoena, discovery, etc).

corp usually have all sensitive stuff ttl deleted for this reasons.

If they did not use my data for training, they should permit me to run the first 1-3 layers of the model locally and send them dense hidden state vectors. In my experience these compress very nicely without much effort.

Used for training is one thing. Exposed to prying eyes is still unstoppable.

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).

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

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

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.

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

This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic.

I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't.

Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.

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)

Codex (5.6 Sol) is extremely to the point and direct in its responses.

Often I'll tell it to summarize what it said only because it's providing too much detail, not that it's using esoteric language or weird claudisms.

No idea why people are still using Claude models.

My impression is they started on Claude Code and never tried Codex or other harness+model combos

I was on the Anthropic train for 2 years, and I tended not to jump between vendors much because it felt like a lot of distraction for little gain. But last week I switched to 5.6 Sol during an Anthropic outage and it made me realize how frustrated I was with Opus 5 and I haven't switched back.

That is true. On 5.6 I have noticed it to be a little bit more like Claude, which I dislike. But still way better than Claude.

I've read many people saying that the huge GPT-4.5 has the best prose of LLMs, but never actually tried it.

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.

Yeah but, which other llm?

> 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.

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.

I asked the same question to chatgpt, claude, and kimi and kimi gave the most sane answer. Part of me wonders if it has anything to do with having more chinese language structure in their dataset

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.

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.

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

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

Pray tell, what output style does the job?

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.

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.

Sounds like both models are guessing at what you want and one guessed right. Or you can just tell it...

> I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't.

One of them writes better by default. One of them doesn't. That's the thing.

With enough steering, I can get a cheap low-capability model to do things correctly in most cases as well. But why bother?

You can tell it to write high quality code, to test things, and to come up with a proper rollout plan of a feature. Or it could just do it by default.

I know where I'm putting my money in that case.

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.

Same. Downloaded chatgpt today. I can't take reading Claude any more.

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.

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.

For research tasks, I like Meta's muse glimmer 30b model run locally. Whatever they did in post-training to make it so terse and direct, it worked. Gets right to the point and wastes no tokens. Here's a snippet from a recent thinking trace:

> Calculation done. Potential confusion: sq km vs acres. Provide both. Output.

Other models would have written paragraphs dancing around the idea. Glimmer barely does sentences.

It doesn't really sound human - which is a plus in my book. I want my robots to talk to me like they are robots.

I dropped back to Opus 4.8 and it's so much better. Opus 5 was - to your point - actually driving me insane.

Just tell it to exclusively write briefly and in ASD-STE100.

Mythos? That's only for super special corporations, you need not apply. Fable? Can't even look at it wrong without running into cybersecurity lockouts. And even if you get past this, it's limited to <50% usage. It took me a month to complete a Fable review on my project.

So stingy. Even with OpenAI's recent usage troubles, they're still so much better than Anthropic it's not even funny. Re-ran the code review with Sol as a benchmark and it turns out Sol's performance is within 70%-90% of Fable's. Anthropic's still got the best model, but what does it matter if I can barely use it?

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 had Max 5x and every 5h window would bite off 10% of my weekly usage. Five Fable sessions per week.

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

Wow the sentiment here is so negative.

I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter.

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

I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues).

It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job of managing the number of agents to keep them within the 5 hour budgets (I think I had to restart it twice).

After 18 hours I ran a /simplify, /code-review, /simplify cycle which went for another 6 hours.

2 billion tokens (mix of Opus and Fable), 24 hours of continuous coding and a bug free outcome. It would have cost $2000 at API prices and worth every cent.

Fable's ability to keep other models on track while working on these long horizon goals is so much better than anything else.

Far from neutered, I've never had a cyber refusal, and Fable's English is actually readable (unlike Opus 5).

As an aside: while I hate reading Opus 5 English it still is a noticeably better model than Sol in my experience.

But I could handle losing Opus5 is I got Sol instead. But there is nothing even close to Fable.

Did it take 18 hours because Fable is comically slow?

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.

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.

> Codex is more token efficient

This is very true, especially vs Opus 5.

> tends to get better results than Fable with less need for extreme token burning shenanigans like 18 hours of subagents.

The strength here was less the code quality and rather the long horizon task tracking.

This was a very large task - I was chatting with the maintainers and we estimated 4 to 6 months work over multiple phases for human coding.

Fable is able to handle that long goal, with incremental steps along the way, handle the verification and course correct when it finds a problem.

I think the larger context helps here some, but the strength of the model on this specific thing is notably better.

I'm not alone in noticing this. https://www.primeintellect.ai/research/nanogpt-speedrun shows Fable is able to manage a run nearly 1/3 longer than Sol (8.7 days vs 6.1 days). In my use cases Sol is much closer to Opus 5 though.

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.

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.

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.

I think it really depends on what people expect from the models and how they "code".

Sol in my eyes is powerful, but it over engineers so much, that its actually a liability. Where as Opus 5 is slightly under develops but you then can give it a small push for what is missing.

I rather have it under develop and i as the human in the loop, can correct/enhance it. Vs the models that adds so much, to the point that your going "dude, stop!". Remember, removing code for a LLM is way, WAY more difficult then adding it.

My main issue is with Sol is that its designed to over engineer without thinking why its doing something. Great that you security harden 1000s of lines of code, but ... nobody will ever get to that code. Its that lack of intelligence is where the model becomes a issue for me.

Its easier to have less code and then do security audits, with you approving what needs to be changed/hardend.

It may simply depend on the developers their mindset. Some folks just want the models to do everything for them, and performance or code bloat means nothing to them (forgetting that this bloat over time makes future LLM work more expensive).

Its funny how everybody has their own opinion for what model is better, when in reality its more about that model fits your own development style better.

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.

My company still hasn’t been able to deploy wide access to Fable because it’s not available on a ZDR basis. This wasn’t mentioned in the article but I imagine this factor is not irrelevant.

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

>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!

Ex-head of the NSA was on the board of directors for OpenAI for a while lol (and still might be there?).

> The no-ZDR is clearly to permit surveillance.

It's to train better models. The three letter agencies don't need to spell it out in a ToS, they just access it if they want.

Not if there's a ZDR policy.

For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for.

What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents.

Less formal document production in other industries is likely to have less structure. That might not matter in some settings but I'm having trouble thinking of an example off the top of my head.

> 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.

Between human languages? The problem will be Google is giving that away for free.

The quality of Google Translate is so low that it isn't even in the picture.

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.

Trouble is they're unreliable.

I compared insurance quotes last week. Needed cover for 2 brands, 1 company. Opus jumps up and down saying both brands need listing on the policy schedule. Human broker said not.

I told opus and it's the usual "thanks you're right" bollocks because it bothered to read in more detail and found that all business activities are covered.

I agree with you in respect to the greatest risks in that industry. Just thought it's worth mentioning that LLM's unsurprisingly are not immune to hallucinating cases. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-lawyers-keep-...

Using them for coding makes it easy to self check its work (assuming those pieces of work are "verifiable").

As proofreading will still need to happen, what do you think the appetite for lawyers is to do this kind of work? Do you think it will drive fees down significantly? Empower younger lawyers at firms who probably are the ones doing this checking for the partners? (Or will that just create a further divide).

I'm genuinely asking as I am not in law but all my family is and it's nice to see someone here that's thought about the impacts in that space.

With access to good databases and tool use, hallucinations are basically a thing of the past (and very easy to verify). The hallucination issue typically comes from people using free ChatGPT or similar - tech usage and literacy is often poor and there's a lack of understanding of the risks of using something without proper legal database tools. Most lawyers would not have the faintest idea of what tool use in the context of an LLM even means. It's still seen as a magic box rather than a tool for real work.

Will it drive down fees significantly? Doubt it, there's not enough pressure on them, and the industry is resistant to change. Firms don't want to make a big deal about using it because clients will then ask why they're not getting a discount.

Will it empower younger lawyers? Not as much as I'd like. I'm very fortunate to have an employer that lets me use Claude Code for my work (to a limited extent). I think for 99.9% of lawyers it's not an option available to them, through a mix of concerns around AI usage and concerned IT departments. There could be great benefits, but it would rely on having to break out of traditional private practice which would make it difficult to get enough work.

I think in the near term LLMs will have much the same impact on the legal industry as it has on the software industry.

Transformer models are quickly becoming a commodity, and I suspect in time we'll all be running them locally. Even now, you can run something pretty useful on a 16 GB graphics card, 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.

It doesn't mean hosted frontier models wont exist, they'll just be rare. It's no different than any other commodity market, for example most cars are cheap commodity models, with rare individuals buying expensive luxury cars and businesses buying expensive trucks and specialized equipment.

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.

>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.

But the Chinese models exist, are competitive, and have locally useful quantized versions.

If you're actually willing to pick up old DC inference hardware on the cheap you can already do a lot at home. The new hardware not so much admittedly but if the Chinese models keep getting better and running on less hardware... I don't see a reason to be quite so pessimistic.

Anthropic killed it for me with all these silly security guardrails. As a programmer I use the models to check for vulnerabilities in my work. I also use the models for fun reverse engineering projects on the side. Neither of these activities are illegal. And I don’t appreciate being treated as a criminal. I asked Claude to do something the other day and it refused. I copied and pasted the exact same prompt into codex and it happily churned away at it for hours. What Anthropic has done to kill their own company is a bit sad.

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.

Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly?

Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or going a little nuts :)

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.

Favourite conversation with Opus 5:

Me: why did you add HTMX?

Opus 5: you asked it twice.

Me: quote the exact sentence(s) where I asked it.

Opus 5: I can’t because you didn’t.

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.

The actual issue, is suspect, is that Anthropic won’t provide ZDR for Fable. Makes it a non started for a large percentage of businesses.

The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving.

I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder.

Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again.

Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

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...

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

But that would require people to think! And the marketing is they don't need to do that...

Last consumer (ish!) product that required people to learn something to use it was PalmOS with Grafitti, wasn't it?

I've spent many years doing work in compliance for airlines. Hundreds of pages of documentation to describe the different rules and regulations which must be followed in specific scenarios. We'd convert those documents into a programmatic definition (rule engine) to alert when rules are at risk of not being followed.

This work was fraught with bugs, a large portion of which came down to disagreement of what was coded v/s what was written. Even if you had airlines sign off sentence by sentence exactly what you wrote down in English, that's too open to interpretation.

People don't appreciate how the same sentence can be read five different ways by different people (or the same person on different days). We had to structure our documents to be closer to pseudo-code than to English to get any meaningful consensus on the definition.

Anthropic’s issue is churn because of the peak verbosity vomit coming out of Opus 5/Mythos/Fable. What the hell did they train it on. The sane model is still Opus 4.6.

The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story.

Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. 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).

Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.

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 PR from the US frontier labs has been poor to terrible from the beginning.

Among other things, "we have stolen the collected works of your culture, now help us grow so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs" has to be one of the absolute worst marketing approaches in history.

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.

I wonder how much of it is fears over "mass-hacking the internet", and how much of it is fears over the model discovering various NSA/CIA/etc "tailored access operations", and other deliberate side-channels / vulnerabilities / etc?

(Or perhaps vulns that NSA/etc discovered and has been keeping it private; as they're known to do).

I feel there's a lot that's unaccounted for, and the whole "AWS team reports a 'jailbreak' that is just 'review this codebase'" story doesn't add up.

I wonder if there were some parallel construction going on, and if at the same time, the NSA started losing the exploits they had because it was getting patched.

China uses the strategy of letting dangerous technologies loose which causes disruption in the short term but makes people do the right thing like secure their software. The US by comparison gives me the impression of wanting to leave the internet vulnerable by not making Mythos public so that only the US government can use Mythos to gain access to whatever system they like, which is the same thing the pegasus software does

> 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.

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work.

I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a …

I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.

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

Right? If we’ve already reached ‘good enough’ then there’s rough waters ahead.

I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google may be making the same bet, looking at the faster and faster Flash models which provide acceptable results to a lot of people (outside of coding).

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.

Would I, a non developer be able to utilize or benefit from Fable? I have been using Sonnet to update and make changes to a piece of open source software that was basically abandoned. It found and fixed a handful of security issues. I am curious if I am missing out on anything. If I change from Sonnet to Fable mid-stream will I lose any history? The one challenge I have run into is turn-by-turn session history. Claude complains about memory constraints. It constantly has to go back and re-learn what it did in our sessions a week or two ago. It accidentally deleted many of its own files so I convinced it to store everything in a .claude sub-directory in my fork of the other persons code so that I can keep it backed up when the claude sandbox has issues. Claude seems to want to talk me out of changing models which I found odd.

I'm just doing this as a hobby for fun and adding features to a program I use. I am trying to make the most of the boost they gave me for August. My account is max pro. (5x more than pro). I am also trying to make the most of this thing in the event that these business models do not pan out.

GLM series has made it very practical to self host. If the new update for Deepseek flash holds up, I think it would be silly for some companies to not self host.

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

The reason I try not to pay for Anthropic is because half the engineering questions I ask get flagged as "too dangerous". Examples: spraying liquids at relatively low pressure, creating small AI models to detect objects via Raspberry Pi cameras, and calculating collisions between moving machine parts. Claude blocks me on almost EVERYTHING, even though the questions are completely valid science and engineering questions. I see NO REASON to pay for Claude when Kimi or GLM's quality it almost as good and I don't get rejected all the time for absolute nonsense. Anthropic is trying to be the uber-safe children's chemistry set where its ok if a kid drinks all of the chemicals in it while playing with it. That's not how you run a successful business. This is just the natural result.

Personally I've been turned off by Anthropic's stance in many topics, regarding replacing software engineers and other professions, shady pricing, being on a high horse etc. In my work I use their models when I absolutely have to, otherwise I use cheap models to do my work.

"Almost Nobody Is Using Anthropic’s Fable 5" - https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/almost-nobody-is-u...

People promoting investment in AI are fooling you with bad TAM estimates. For example, if we valued every spreadsheet created using the same metrics of pre-automation paper spreadsheets, spreadsheets would be a $100 trillion business.

Computing technologies are relentlessly deflationary. If the value of their TAM wasn't a fraction of a manual process they replace, they wouldn't have a productivity advantage. And the amount of TAM per unit often declines over the life of that product category.

I would be unsurprised to find investment in data centers to be 10X what was really needed. The same goes for where the LLM S curve starts to flatten.

I started using llm's on a $20 claude license, then it became a $100 license.

Then all the mythos warnings happened, then the fable access issues started.

At that point, I just wanted to try something else because I didn't want to feel vendor locked by anthropic.

Then I tried codex on the $100 plan. I've never been happier. It does everything claude can do, without any token limit issues or anything for me.

I don't see myself going back to claude anytime soon. I also highly recommend folks to not vendor lock yourself to a model. You need to try multiple models for yourself and see what's possible. There should be zero loyalty to any frontier lab because of how fast things change and how volatile model access, uptime and customer experience can be with these things.

Ive gave it a lot of thought, and what's happening is like what's happening with 4K streaming. It's not really 4K but no one cares. People don't have trained eyes and exaggerate their technical literacy. I also think that anti-intellectualism nullifies the benefits of the most intelligent AI models America has. No one knows the difference and they don't care.

I just don't like Anthropic's 5.0 models. When I tried Fable and Opus 5.0, they were super-slow and gave me sub-par results. I went back to Opus 4.8, and then switched to GPT 5.6 Luna. It's cheaper and better than Fable.

This is just a case of competition working: Fable (and Opus 5.0) just aren't as good as Anthropic believes, and there's no switching cost, so everyone's moving away.

Asking for a Friend, what's the best subscription, from another ai vendor, similar to Claude Max+ allowance and models "intelligence" but cheaper? Thanks!

I switched to GPT 5.6 Sol for the hardest tasks, the rest Qwen/Kimi/Deepseek can do.

So far not looking back to Anthropic. They lost me.

Oh, no! Quick, build more data centers!

context: working in tech consulting with non-tech industry partners.

outside of coding scenarios, anthropic is just not quite the best choice for regular folks.

depending on the cloud/office stack used by the company, the userbase is better poised to use the native ai offering than moving to anthropic and connecting everything with them. same goes for third party guys trying to tie it all together.

not to discount them or their features, but beyond small companies or startups, we don't see the same levels of adoptions now nor maybe in the near future.

those asking us to build genai solutions for them also do not choose anthropic first over the main model offered by their current CSP. anthropic made itself available across the board finally, but it was already too late for most projects planned out for the upcoming quarters. also, we don't use the absolute biggest model nor instantly migrate to the latest one. the insane price jumps do not help with the same. especially when we quote something that may no longer be true down the line.

aside: good luck to the FDE folks hired by the frontier labs. i wonder if they would really get to handle large company-wide projects in practice.

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