I'd say 5.6 Sol performs between opus and fable, but not yet fable.

Just that given its cost efficiency, claude subscription isn't attractive at all when fable is removed.

Agreed. It’s also a lot better at following instructions. If anything codex can get caught into an overly literal adherence to instruction while Claude you can barely trust it to sit still for 5 minutes. Tell Claude to use an MCP for a task, 30% chance it’ll do it. Provide it skills, 10% chance it’ll use them when appropriate. Codex is almost the mirror of that. It’ll almost always use the MCP and recall the skills.

The challenge I think for codex is the restriction on context size and the constantly rolling compactions. They are less aggressive or disruptive but it is still annoying you can’t force a 1mm context window on a 1mm context window model.

But it’s recall beyond compaction boundaries is much better than Claude code. The impact of compaction is much less noticeable.

Performance on task work is between fable and opus, but the marginal utility between that gap is not enough to pay extra.