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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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