I am not sure about GPT-5.6. It usually 10x more verbose for no apparent reason than GPT-5.5. Maybe it is only me.

Have you tried Claude? 5.6 feels less verbose, and less messy to me.

Yeah Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.5 what I use. Fable is okish, the coding experience is a bit weird with it.

it is definitely more verbose.