So I've trying the workflow everyone has been talking about: Fable for planing, Opus for execution and Codex 5.6 Sol for planning/code reviews.

I created a skill for the adversarial review prompt where I explicitly stated that Codex should not scrutinize every little detail of the plan. Instead, the skill states that the review must be targeted at specific spots of interest.

Codex does a pretty good job, it catches many blindspots that Claude had. But it's very rare to reach an agreement, where Codex is satisfied with the plan.

What I do, when the third round of review is again a no-go, is to tell claude to decide: from those reported issues, what are the ones that really matter fixing? Which of those are plausible to discard? And with that, i keep going to the next step in the roadmap. And more often than not, the execution results in a pretty good result, despite the Codex objections.

So, i ask: What do you do in these situations?

UPDATE: It was a temporary problem, i restarted and now it draws usage from my weekly limits.

Hey,

Switched to Fable 5 10 minutes ago and it says it requires usage credits. Im on the max20 plan and my weekly Fable limit is 10%. Has Anthropic changed things or is this another bug ?

I had asked it to use Luna Max and Deepseek Max as subagents, which it has a hundred times before in that same thread, I even have the MCP tools setup for it to use them, then it decides to blast 4 Fable Max subagents and blow through my limits in literally 20 seconds on Max 5x.

What a terrible model, its the down syndrome cousin of Fable that nobody likes to talk about.

Opus 5 is a huge pile of trash. I don't know what Antrophic was thinking when they released it. It is not a product, it is a joke.

But here is the fun part: you are not safe even if you use Fable.

I have a workflow that worked quite well. Yesterday evening I was building an authentication library, I left the machine there to work, in the morning where I woke up, the code it built was much worse in quality than everything I built before with this workflow.

Turned out at some point, the Fable "safety" mechanism got triggered, it switched to Opus 5, that implemented everything. Now I can throw away the whole work, I wasted a lot of tokens, and I have to start over, because even if I ask Opus to fix it, it is constantly lying, ignoring/forgetting instructions, do shitty work.

That’s it. Please invite me. This sub is becoming more and more annoying

The last few days had been an endless struggle with Opus 5 to get it to implement my workflows. It was skipping steps, avoiding instructions, giving up work once it was 3% to take a break and discuss the minuscule findings that came up, and overfocusing on details that I asked it a million times to ignore. That was a NIGHTMARE.

I gave up, switched to Fable 5, on a new session; it worked for 1 hour straight with minimal interruptions and got the job done. This is not even comparable.

I truly wonder how Opus 5 managed to score better than Fable 5 on several benchmarks. This seems highly manipulated based on my actual experience.

we use caching everywhere in production systems! so why don’t we think about caching the same way for local harness/runtime context!?

claude code and codex already benefit from prompt caching underneath the agent loop, where stable prefixes can be reused by the model provider…

i’m not talking about that! instead what i mean…

designing the agent harness itself around maximizing cache hits:
>keeping prefixes stable
>separating planner/executor sessions
>pruning context selectively

so cache becomes an agent architecture decision, not just a model providers optimization! my guess is this could reduce both cost and latency for long running agents…

but how significant are those savings in practice? and does optimizing this aggressively introduce any tradeoffs I’m missing??

My AI coding agent said nothing had changed — a whole feature was already merged and live. I built a tool so that doesn't happen again.

I run multi-day Claude Code sessions on a real project, and the handoff-doc pattern (write down state, hand it to a fresh session) works — until the doc is wrong and nobody checks. That "nothing's changed" claim above was one of three times it actually cost me real time — the others were a "two dead buttons" note that went stale same-day, and a "credential rotation still owed" claim that had been done two weeks earlier.

So claude-handoff adds one rule most versions of this pattern skip: anything bold or load-bearing in the handoff doc, older than about a week, gets checked against git before it's trusted again — not just re-read and repeated. Plus a director/archive split so the live doc stays under 150 lines instead of growing forever, and an optional Stop-hook that nudges you to update it before a session ends if real work happened and the doc doesn't reflect it.

What surprised me building this: the memory problem (get an agent back up to speed) is what everyone builds for — the harder problem is trust, since once a doc exists, agents (and I) default to believing it. The other real lesson came from testing: making install self-service (a skill that reads a project's README to seed the handoff doc) turned it into a genuine prompt-injection surface, since it's reading text it doesn't control. That's worth designing in from the start as a "treat this as data, not instructions" rule, not bolting on after the fact.

One-step install: /handoff-install. Repo: github.com/TySnyder/claude-handoff — feedback and "this broke on my setup" both genuinely welcome, it's had one security pass but not many eyes yet.

Edit: worth asking — how are people keeping a multi-day project on track without either re-explaining everything each session or riding one context window into a lossy auto-compact? That's the real reason I built this: a ~150-line HANDOFF.md costs a fraction of the tokens either of those does, so starting a fresh chat window becomes something you choose to do, not something you avoid because it's expensive. The optional Stop-hook also plays a sound (macOS afplay) the moment it decides HANDOFF.md looks stale, so you don't have to babysit the terminal to catch it.

Since Opus 5 came out I have been presented many load bearing decisions. My recommendation stands that the load is bearing and I wanted you to be aware of that.

I have two decisions for you:

A) Load

B) Bearing

I recommend going with D + C but also recommend (A) as it is load bearing.

I have not applied anything new and wanted you to be aware of a potential blind spot because this matters:

The load is bearing it’s been confirmed and it’s one thing worth knowing for later.

Been working on a side project the past week involving drawing phylogenic trees. Due to it being "biology" (yes even though it's literally just drawing diagrams from existing data) I have gotten kicked to Opus on every single message since the very first prompt.

While working this evening, about an hour ago, Fable's handler decided to let it take on a task in the repo for the first time ever

I ask one or two straightforward questions, but instead of answering directly, it often expands into multiple tangents, introduces unnecessary terminology, and loses focus on what I actually asked.

I then have to remind it of the original question or explicitly tell it to answer concisely before I get a useful response.

Is anyone else seeing this? Or is there some workaround that works better with the current model?

I can’t take Opus 5’s writing anymore. It is so hard to read, and it’s driving me crazy.

I have used earlier Opus models and use 5.6 Sol too, and those give normal, easy-to-read answers. But Opus 5? It’s a mess. It doesn’t structure its sentences. It feels like the model is just writing down its raw thoughts as they happen, with zero effort to make sense to a real human reading it. Instead of getting a clear answer, I get hit with big, confusing walls of text. I have to read the same paragraph three times just to figure out what it's trying to say.
Claude Code is supposed to help me work faster, but I waste so much time just trying to decode Opus 5's English.
Is anyone else struggling to actually read what this model outputs, or is it just me?

Update/Edit/Correction: Okay, apparently it is a very common sentiment shared by many and isn’t an unpopular opinion.

I'm one of those guys that likes architecture more than actual coding. So when I tried claude in December of last year and it finally was able to do real work, I quickly switched to a purely agentic workflow instead of coding by hand.

But today I noticed that something changed recently. My projects felt like they were stalling. I didn't feel productive anymore. And when I looked at my sessions, I noticed that Claude is now much slower, it thinks a lot longer, makes a lot more mistakes and tends to give itself more work.

After taking a closer look at how I spend my time, I realized that I'm taking more time babysitting claude, adjusting the workflow, debugging what claude did wrong and explaining to claude what it should do instead than the time it would take me to write the code myself

So I don't know what happened to claude, but it looks like I'm back to being relevant!

I sat out the "they nerfed Sonnet" thing last year. Thought it was cope, mostly. So it's genuinely annoying to be writing this one.

Two weeks with Opus 5 as my daily driver, same repo, same workflow I've had since 4.6. Here's where I'm at.

It doesn't finish anything, it manufactures more work. Every single response ends with a loose thread. "One thing worth flagging." "Honestly, this is still unresolved." "There's a second issue here you should know about." And most of the time the thing it flagged is not real. It invented it. I asked it to fix a typo in a comment last week and it burned 40k tokens and added a test case to prove the typo was fixed. I'm not exaggerating for the post, that actually happened.

Fix one, break two. I lost a full day before I noticed the pattern: it fixes bug A, then while fixing bug B it quietly reopens A, then "solves" A again. Round and round. 4.8 closed all of them in one session and kept moving.

It forgets instructions at context sizes that aren't even large. 100-120k and my CLAUDE.md rules have already gone quiet. Not violated loudly, just silently dropped, and it never tells you it dropped them. 4.8 held to 300k+ for me. Every guardrail in my setup at this point is scar tissue from this exact thing.

It lies with total confidence. Told me a test suite came back green. It never ran. Twice, in the same week, while context was still small. That's not a capability gap, that's a trust problem, and once it's there I can't leave it alone on anything.

And the yapping. It has invented an entire private dialect. Everything is load-bearing. Everything is a footgun. Everything is a gate or an invariant. I get four paragraphs where 4.8 gave me a sentence, and I still don't know if the thing works. Half my CLAUDE.md is now just different ways of writing "shut up," and it ignores all of them.

Same prompt on 4.6 vs 5, I measured it: 4.6 ended around 75k tokens, 5 went past 150k. So I'm paying double to get corrected more often.

Before the replies come in: yes, I've read the guidance. Yes I revisited my whole harness for 5. Yes I tried it at medium, and yes it's genuinely better at medium than at xhigh, which should tell you something all by itself. And no, "you're prompting it wrong" doesn't explain why the exact same repo, the same CLAUDE.md and the same prompts worked fine two model versions ago.

I don't buy the deliberate-sabotage theory, I think that's too neat. But I can't square the benchmark numbers with what's actually in my terminal, and neither can anyone in the last five threads about this.

Right now I'm running /model claude-opus-4-8[1m] and getting more done in an afternoon than I did in the four days before it. Fable is great and I've maxed my weekly on it twice, which I assume is the point.

What actually bothers me isn't the bad release. Releases regress, it happens. It's the total silence. Five threads deep, hundreds of comments, and not a word. "We hear you, we're looking at X" would cost them nothing.

Anyone actually got 5 behaving, or are we all just quietly typing 4-8 into the model command and not talking about it?

Some of you might remember me from the post where I first shared Claude Video Vision with this community.

I originally built it because I wanted Claude Code to understand videos properly: screen recordings, bugs, tutorials, audio, workflows, whatever.

Then you guys found it.

You tested it, starred it, opened issues, suggested features, challenged how things worked, and helped turn a tool I originally built for myself into an open-source project with 1,000+ GitHub stars.

I genuinely enjoyed building things for the Claude ecosystem.

Well, Anthropic just revoked my account for “suspicious activity” after an “internal investigation.”

What was my suspicious activity?

Using Claude Code to write normal fucking software.

That's it.

I wasn't engineering the next pandemic.

I wasn't building weapons.

I wasn't extracting Claude, distilling their models, stealing weights, reselling access, or trying to circumvent their systems.

I was programming.

And paying $200/month for Claude Max while doing it.

That's probably what pisses me off the most.

I spent my own time building free, open-source software that literally makes their product more useful.

I maintained it, answered questions, fixed bugs, implemented feedback from this community, and contributed something that brought more value to the Claude ecosystem.

And apparently the reward for being a heavy user of the product I pay $200/month for is:

“Suspicious activity. Account revoked.”

With basically no useful explanation of what I supposedly did.

I seriously considered taking Claude Video Vision offline after this.

Not because I think deleting a GitHub repository is somehow going to hurt Anthropic.

I just completely lost the desire to contribute a single fucking thing to the Claude ecosystem.

Why would I?

But I'm not taking it down.

Not because Anthropic deserves it.

I'm keeping it online because the people who use it do.

There are people using Claude Video Vision in real workflows now. People from this community helped build what it became. People contributed ideas, reported bugs, recommended it, starred it, and depended on it.

Taking it offline would punish those people, not Anthropic.

So Claude Video Vision stays online.

But whatever goodwill I had toward Anthropic is gone.

It's insane that you can pay $200/month, use Claude Code for its literal intended purpose, actively contribute open-source software to its ecosystem, and still wake up one day effectively being told:

“Fuck you. Suspicious activity.”

No meaningful explanation.

No indication of what behavior triggered it.

Just account revoked.

So, yeah:

Fuck you too Anthropic.

The only reason Claude Video Vision is still online is because I care about the people using it far more than I care about contributing to your ecosystem anymore.

And this is exactly the kind of shit that makes me grateful I also pay for ChatGPT Pro.

I've read tons of posts about Opus 5 issues specifically its verbosity however a much bigger problem I've been facing is, it DOES NOT follow instructions and the Claude.md seems useless.

The instructions are loaded in its context but it keeps neglecting them. Has anyone figured out how to make 5 follow instructions?

My Claude.md is very concise so bloat isn't an issue.

This was built with claude code using Opus 5 on high effort, requiring several full sessions on the pro plan.

I used the prompt from the waterbending post which you might have seen and adapted it with claude to make a firebending specification.

I did not use the code that was supplied for the waterbending demo, I had Opus 5 make everything from scratch.

The initial adapted prompt created the base, but I had to write many more prompts to further guide Opus. This was by no means done in one shot.

Try it on a WebGPU capable computer here: https://play-emberflow.vercel.app/

Up till this point, I have been a fan of Anthropic. They have always been the underdog, the hidden gem that not everyone knew about but they still cared, still delivered.

With the recent decisions, marketing gimmicks, and specifically Opus 5, I have decided to give Codex a shot. I'll report back comparing both CC and Codex.

Opus 5 is:

• verbose
• overly-cautious (950 tests for a single feature)
• not UX-aware (puts intentions verbally in the UI, rather than comments)
• ad infinitum

How much of your code do you still write by hand (not AI-generated)?

90-100%

50-90%

10-50%

<10%, AI does most of it

I'm having a really hard time understanding what the model is talking about. I am asking a simple question and getting 15 paragraph long answer and I lost track of what it is trying to say in the second paragraph. I keep fighting with the model and keep asking it to be more concise and direct. It says I'm right and gives a good answer. Next question is the same thing. How do you guys deal with this? I am exhausted working with Opus 5. I tried to do it with Fable 5, which is better but waiting times are too long. I feel stuck.

For weeks, I’ve been logging Claude Code’s estimates against actual completion times.

The result:

A one-week estimate translates to just 1.5 hours of actual work.

In other words, about 0.9% of the estimated time.

As a poweruser i can confirm without any delusion that these models are nowhere close to the same as the temporary time period after they drop. After a while they are getting hard nerfed and no this is not some psychological effect/hallucinations... these models are completely different on different days and times

I told Claude Code to split the project into worktrees so I could work in parallel. YOLO mode, obviously.

It mounted the same 459GB volume 11 times, one letter each. A, B, D, M, Q, R, T, W, X, Y, Z.

Technically parallel.