Quality of code output has dropped dramatically since 4.5 IIHO. Time to complete has gotten worse too.

MyFirstSass 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

True, and the time to completion thing is something i haven't seen much discussion of, because everything is sloooooow these days.

I've even considered the claude "fast mode" setting, but thats only 2x and at least 20x as expensive as the 5x plan so can't afford that atm for my company.

Peak for me was 4.6 and it just did stuff blazing fast, both Opus5 and Fable is way, way slower for me, breaks stuff, uses bizarre cryptic language. As i've said elsewhere in this thread to me it's pretty obvious there's huge downgrades because of economy with various "clever" fixes that makes them work, albeit slower and weirder, ie. you get less for what you pay increasingly over the last 6 months.

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markbao 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redirections in 4.5.

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tripledry 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Interesting how models become better and beat benchmarks left and right but the user sentiment is actually quite mixed.

From forums, live discussions and my own experience it's not obvious that the models have improved much since around Opus4.5.

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MyFirstSass 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From my view Fable has been pure marketing bullshit, my workflows peaked at 4.6, Fable is neither smarter, its language is more annoying and it breaks stuff more easily.

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Root_Access 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm with you 4.6 is still King for me although all models require careful attention to ensure they maintain taste. If you don't know enough about what you're doing to keep the code clean yourself they will all add complexity and drift with time until you get to a point that you must rely on the model to fix it because you no longer understand it. That's a situation I hope to never find myself in.

	▲	MyFirstSass 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly, the most important part is to still engineer the schematics 100%, diagram whats going on and steer it towards these set-in-stone standards and patterns, otherwise you'll have no idea whats going on fast. I good exercise for me is to constantly look at the folder structure and skim the code, i don't have to approve every line, but the primitives, the datastructures and other skeleton should be human readable, hand writable in an easy maintainable way following existing standards / libs. etc - so you can continue if suddenly all AI disappeared.