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.
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.
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.
They also made Fable no longer ZDR for businesses which killed tons of demand for it.
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
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.
It tends to bail occasionally for me once auth-related code comes into play.
Nowadays Codex handles the bulk of the implementation and Fable/Opus on the planning.
Not sure if Anthropic patched it, but early on its release the web UI Fable guardrails will trip if you mention you're a biologist.
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’ve only hit it twice. First time was a code review. Fair.
2nd time was literally me being lazy and telling it to commit and open a PR.
Very strange.
I found a crash in zsh and Fable refused to work after that.
Fable is still on the $100 plan for me. (Maybe this is A/B testing or something.)
Might as well not be - I routinely get rate limited in a single review session.
I've honestly stopped using CC and moved to codex. Sol has it's warts but I've never once hit limits on a 100€ and I get a similar level of performance for what I'm doing.
I wouldn't mind bumping Fable to 200$ plan if it was actually better but between the insane caps, reverting to opus/sonnet randomly and having similar perf as OAI - I'm done with it.
Next step is to put 100$ into open router and try some western hosted open models with Pi when OAI starts pulling up prices.
What do you mean by "review session"?
You can turn off the reverting to opus with an option.
I did not know that - but what happens then I get denied and I plead with the model that my usecase doesn't violate its TOS ? Edit prompt till I get it to pass ?
Reverting is annoying but being flagged for security questions while I'm doing code review is insane.
Yes, you get to re-try it until it might pass. Each attempt uses tokens at Fable level though. I once burned through a 4 hour window ($20 plan) in 4 attempts to re-frame the request.
You want to disable "Switch models when a message is flagged"[1]
[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/16049681-why-claude-s...
I still havent used it much, and they crippled Opus for what feels like no reason. Some suspect that Opus knowing theres a better model degrades it some. Shame.
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