| ▲ | netsec_burn 7 hours ago |
| After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally. |
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| ▲ | jchw 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any model to do, and it does great. For the more advanced stuff, it definitely needs the effort bumped. But even with the effort bumped, the token usage really doesn't seem to skyrocket too badly until at least you hit xhigh and max, which really only seem to be necessary if you are doing genuine crazy stuff, so it's not that bad. I did similar stuff with Fable. In fact, I went directly from an Anthropic subscription with Fable to an OpenAI subscription with Sol, more or less, and it really felt pretty seamless. If anything, I was thrilled to realize how much I actually preferred Codex CLI, to the point where I started using it at work too. Fable seems to be generally more impressive at outputting one-shot web apps. I'm not really saying that to try to downplay what Fable can do, it's just that if I compare the two, this is one of the few definitely noticeable areas that you can easily demonstrate. Obviously, one-shotting programs is much better as a demonstration of a model's capabilities than it is practically useful (not that it is useless, but hopefully my point is understood). However, whatever Fable truly is better at, one thing I really like about GPT 5.6 Sol is even harder to quantify: taste. GPT 5.6 Sol outputs are still LLM outputs and they contain many things that people would probably consider "Claude-isms" for better or worse, but overall I really prefer the GPT 5.6 Sol output. I find it to be generally more tasteful. Hard to quantify, but when talking to people I've had enough people seemingly agree with me to convince me that it really is true. |
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| ▲ | andrewingram 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I used Sol to extract the remaining decryption keys from the Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch) game files. Someone had previously extracted all the keys from the original release, but not any of the new ones from updates. Not only did it succeed, but it helped me understand the data sufficiently to add support for “Super World” rendering to my level viewer (which I made back in 2021), eg the little widget at the top of https://www.smm2-viewer.com/players/B16-306-GVG I was very pleasantly surprised to find Sol wasn’t obstructive over what was clearly a very grey area endeavour. | | |
| ▲ | mjhagen an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I was having it look at creating a driver for some old scanner and it actively looked up exactly where that gray area for my country was wrt decompilation. | |
| ▲ | alchemist1e9 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fable is almost unusable for anything but super boring mainstream stuff. I was getting safeguard flagged so often I’ve significantly reduced my usage out of fear they will blacklist/ban me. Some of the topics it’s flagged have been hard for me to understand what it seeing that can be remotely concerning in my requests. | | |
| ▲ | andai 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The safety is really funny to me. I ask it a lot of extreme stuff and it goes through, but I ask it mundane stuff and hit the filters all the time. | | |
| ▲ | vjvjvjvjghv 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Reminds me of the URL blocking of my company. Nature.com is being blocked but I can access a ton of super sketchy download sites. | |
| ▲ | vintermann 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It has learned a little too well how it works in human society. |
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| ▲ | xscott 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've gotten flagged for asking questions about tokens and tensors. That makes me believe it's not about safety, it's about protecting their turf. I cancelled my subscription - same fear about getting flagged too much leading to a ban. |
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| ▲ | eli_gottlieb 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Have they made Sol do less unwanted autonomy than the previous Codex models did? |
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| ▲ | hatthew 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I feel like those examples are considered difficult because they're niche topics, but aren't actually all that difficult in a general sense. What I consider truly difficult are things like taking a ticket and implementing it in a preexisting codebase, using a clean and reasonable design that fits the existing style and makes sense to a human, and avoids the footguns I learned by working with the codebase for over a day. | | |
| ▲ | user43928 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | This is true in some sense. Getting the AI to output code that you like is difficult. As an example, let's say in React you have a "useLocale()" hook. The AI will happily pass down locale as a prop to 5 child components instead of just calling the hook in the component. A review from another model did not flag such stylistic issues either. I believe that the latest models are very good at functionally achieving the goal, but still have poor taste for UX or code quality. The most productive use of AI for software development happens in an environment where you do not review the code but test the UX end to end. | | |
| ▲ | boorang 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I use the AGENTS.md to show it how i want the code to look like. Something like "when implementing hooks adhere to the guidelines in docs/react-hooks.md". And then react-hooks describes your heuristics and what you consider best practices. There is a clear difference in code quality for me when using codex with a well crafted AGENTS.md vs. without one, you can run the experiment yourself pretty easily. As I mentioned in another comment, I think Claude poisoned users to stop relying on their Claude.md files and new codex users might be surprised at how well it adheres to guidelines. |
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| ▲ | jchw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you said this in 2025 I would've 100% understood, but to be honest getting AI models to do a pretty good job on day-to-day ticket work has become so boring that we don't even bother using the top tier models and higher effort slots for that anymore. I personally wind up tweaking the results a lot and recursively having fresh agents review the diff, but that's just because I'm picky; in a lot of cases the first diff is actually pretty damn decent. Compared to what I am doing at home experimentally, I feel like day-to-day work is absolutely nothing. Not only am I also working with existing codebases in my experimental prototyping, but I am also doing things vastly more complex with vastly harder constraints. | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | All non-trivial code terra has generated for me has had at least one serious bug in it. Typically caught by a review from myself or Sol. But I wouldn't trust lower tier models for end to end solutions. |
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| ▲ | cgannett 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And Mai-Code-1.1-Flash seems like a really good cooperative player to GPT 5.6 Sol. You get Sol to help you make a detailed plan, and Mai codes it up and you can get pretty decent code out the other end without too many tokens if you are careful. | | | |
| ▲ | edg5000 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | FYI I run it consistently in xhigh regardless of difficulty of the task at hand. I remember high being very fast, but I'd rather wait a bit more and get better output. AIs are insanely fast compared to me anyway, even on xhigh. Consumes more usage, but even at 100 EUR/m I don't hit limits. | | |
| ▲ | saghm 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | After hitting the session limit on my company's plan so many times with Claude when I was using it, I mostly keep Codex on "high" rather than "xhigh" as a way to leave the tokens for my more ambitious coworkers. It's possible that having it higher might end up with better output, but so far at least I've yet to see a way to get any model to do 100% of what I need up front without any need for me to make changes that end up being more tedious to do via interaction than by hand, and it doesn't feel worth spending a bunch more tokens trying to figure out how to better communicate to it up front how the dominoes get set up so they fall in place properly the next time. | |
| ▲ | jchw 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To be fair, I actually do run xhigh as my default. However, for the first time in my experience of trying and using LLMs, with Sol.. sometimes I feel confident enough to set the effort level to "Low". I just had Sol prototype some AWS stuff on low earlier. Great result, did exactly what I wanted. | |
| ▲ | FooBarWidget an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | How do you handle context limits? With more thinking tokens you fill it up earlier. Compaction degrades performance too. What's your strategy? |
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| ▲ | wonnage an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AI-pilled obsession with "taste" is bordering on insanity It's just vibes | | |
| ▲ | mfru an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's vibes all the way down. It's... really just vibes? Always has been. |
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| ▲ | calvinmorrison 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | things that are alchemical are rarely alchemy. That is to say things are very fiddly but stick a room of monkeys on typewriters, a schizophrenic developer with HolyC and adderall or an LLM, persistence is the key to many of these things like drivers, extracting keys from vintage security domains, etc. Dropping into xdd to a human is a chore, not for an LLM. | | |
| ▲ | jchw 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Although I am not exactly sure what you mean, I am not really claiming it is doing anything I couldn't do - but yes, it does so with much less effort. For example, I can have it set up probes and tracing on Linux that I personally would have to consult documentation to do. It might not even have to consult the documentation due to having the information on-tap, but even if it does, it's nothing that would cause it any fatigue, it's just going to keep moving forward in a loop until it is satisfied that it meets the criteria. I could've done all of this alone - I really could have. I just would not have. Being able to do something 10 times faster or with 10 times less effort is, in some senses, sometimes more impactful than being able to do entirely new things you couldn't do before. | | |
| ▲ | saghm 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a really good point that I definitely failed to grasp when first hearing about these tools. At least for me, the best way to use these tools is as a way to free myself from having to spend time thinking about the things that aren't worthwhile so I can focus on the things that truly are. I've had times in my life spending hours reading documentation and googling random things to try to tease out the correct sequence of commands or the exact right shape of an API to be able to make things work to know that it doesn't make me more productive to do that myself rather than point an LLM at the thing and let it spit out the answer after a few minutes. Meanwhile, I can spend that time thinking about what comes next, or what the correct way to take that one-off output and abstract it to something that can be used meaningfully in more flexible ways. The only obvious objection I can think of to this line of thinking (at least from a technical perspective) is "how does someone build up the knowledge to be able to use a tool effectively in that way if not by doing things by hand at first?" The honest answer that is "I don't know, but that's also pretty much exactly the type of thing my employers have never been paying me to solve in the first place". Even just a decade into my career, there have already been plenty of times in my career I've struggle to convince people that we should do stuff in a way that won't bite us in the ass a month or two down the line, and in the times I've managed to succeed, it's usually only by putting in more of my own time and effort to make the initial investment seem more palatable. Luckily right now I'm not in one of those times when I'm having to go full throttle to keep the lights on a few months from now, but I don't have enough fuel in reserves to work on a plan for when we need to build a new rocket in another ten years. Maybe ask me next month. |
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| ▲ | kyxsc 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less. After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues. Fable (imo) had the edge on the $200 plan, but after this 50% reduction I'd say Codex is better value by far and there's no contest. --- Using Fable as the orchestrator and delegating tasks to Sol 5.6 Ultra via the codex plugin in Claude Code yielded good results, but still there was a lot more over-engineering (thus time and tokens spent) than Fable by itself would've done. Both models suffer from doing-too-much. But both models are fundamentally really smart and knowledgeable. I think it's really close and pricing cuts really spice things up for us consumers! Sol is a clear winner in the value department and the $100 plan is enticing! --- *Claude Code usage is reducing by 33% in 2 days, Wednesday August 19... cmon anthropic: clau.de/cc-50-promo |
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| ▲ | andreygubarev 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, I very much agree on this. I think Sol and Fable code quality is on par. Maybe Fable is just a tiny bit better, but Sol compensates with its ability to work through things, while Fable, in my experience, generally tends to avoid solving problems that require many LOC. However, I think these are very different models in terms of orchestration. Long-horizon tasks are way more predictable with Fable. It just doesn't lose track of details. Thus I ended up building a small wrapper around Pi (where I run Sol) so that CC can delegate via background tasks, automatically wait for completion, and do what was one of the most effective parts - steer Sol toward simplicity, getting Sol out of code-review infinite loops (Pi calls for Codex review to ship better, but generally gets stuck on P2 and results in vastly overengineered work). One of the worst experiments was enforcing coverage at 100%. Only Sol, with an enormous amount of code and significant pushback (on architecture decisions) to Fable, was able to reach it. It made me think this is somehow related to overengineering in general, so that instructions on acceptance criteria in claude.md plus proper DX (e.g., Lefthook) actually led to okay results. It mostly helped that responsibilities were clearly split: Fable designs architecture, Sol handles coding and debugging. | |
| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | greenavocado 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sol w/ Effort -> Low | | |
| ▲ | kyxsc 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's great, don't get me wrong, but so is Fable. I'm just comparing the long-horizon task performance between the two at the same or similar effort levels. Given the 50% discount on Sol and how smart it is, yeah it's unprecedented value. If you only want to use low effort, there's a clear winner here on value and it's not even close! |
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| ▲ | iJohnDoe 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Interesting the use of Max and Ultra. I don’t doubt the complexity, but would someone use Max or Ultra on Typescript or Go, for example? Is it more about just avoiding any mistakes? Seems like that would be costly when medium or high would work fine? | | |
| ▲ | kyxsc 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | *The "Max" I referred to was the plan tier, not the effort level btw For small tasks, you can just use something like low or medium effort and it can usually avoid mistakes; after all, the model will test the code anyways and can do some baseline level of iterating. In regards to cost, we need to acknowledge how generous OpenAI was in the last couple months with Codex usage credits (no weekly limits) and usage resets. It afforded me many a dive with Codex! Yes it uses more tokens, but sometimes it's worth it -- just depends on what you're working on. Finally, Ultra(code) isn't that bad when it comes to cached tokens. I think folks overstate the general token usage of ultra effort on both providers. --- Both models are great at green-fielding a project when given detailed specs. Both models overthink too liberally (imo) during these larger multi-shots. Sol overthinks more than Fable. Both models are really smart and perform great for general knowledge and regular coding tasks. |
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| ▲ | leokennis 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 5.6 Sol is a joy to use for "daily chat" as well. Compared to earlier OpenAI models it catches and corrects its mistakes very reliably. It also seems way smarter in tuning its replies to areas I am more/less knowledgeable about (i.e. when I ask it a law question, it assumes I know as much as a toddler which is true, but on political topics it more easily throws around terminology) and including analogies. On medium thinking, it's a very good compromise between speed and quality. |
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| ▲ | boorang an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was pleasantly surprised to find that the GPT models are much stricter in adhering to my AGENTS.md guidelines and heuristics than Claude. |
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| ▲ | FL410 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fable feels less cumbersome to work with, but it is SO DAMN ANNOYING with the refusals that I'm leaning more and more on Sol, and very much looking forward to GPT6. Just seems like Anthropic is trying their hardest to ruin their reputation and user experience. |
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| ▲ | paxys 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Remember, Dario knows best | |
| ▲ | teaearlgraycold 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’ve never had it refuse anything. Even vulnerability searching in my codebase. | | |
| ▲ | ChadNauseam an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I feel like I'm living in a different dimension than these people. I wonder what they're working on. I've literally never had it refuse everything and I max out my 20x plan every week | | |
| ▲ | FL410 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | As one random example, today I had it hit a refusal loop when adding a country selector dropdown to a form, presumably because it contained a “bad” country name? I hit refusals at least 2-3 times per day, sometimes many more. The worst part is it is often right in the middle of a multi-stage task, so the only option is really to switch to Opus 5 and let it defecate its absurdly verbose comments all over the rest of the edits in the turn and hope it doesn’t go on one of its tangents, then have Sol do damage control. Oh and I got approved for their “cyber verification program” blessing, which comically does absolutely nothing for Fable. | |
| ▲ | SyneRyder 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can I ask which country you're in? I have a theory that the safeguards differ depending on the user's country. I'm in Australia, and Fable downgrades to Opus when testing for bugs in memory in a legacy C code base. If Fable starts taking initiative and writes a test case that involves writing to a null pointer, that's the end of the conversation. |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I too switched to OpenAI after I got sick of Anthropic's constant "safety" downgrades. Sol is definitely a breath of fresh air. > even after completing the verification program Was it easy to complete it? I ended up in some weird state where I can't even attempt the verification at all. Opened the Persona tab once, closed it and then it never opened ever again. It says a verification precheck failed. Even without TAC, Sol doesn't seem to get blocked very often. Fable would downgrade to Opus if I looked at it wrong. |
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| ▲ | ec109685 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fable is still the best there is. Sol close second but I find it gets way to stuck on details. Also Opus 5 is fine if your codebase is simple. |
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| ▲ | znnajdla 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sol is my daily driver but there are still times I reach for Fable when Sol doesn’t cut it. Just yesterday for example, I was trying to build a self-modifying hot-reloaded agent harness in Elixir for fun and Sol just kept doing silly things like thin wrappers and unnecessary abstractions. Fable handled the task elegantly. Sol is really good as a reviewer for finding bugs due to its thoroughness however. |
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| ▲ | Aargau 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm also in Anthropic Cyber Verification Program, but they specifically exclude Fable, just goes up to Opus 5. I hear you on the downgrades, I'm 13/13 on downgrades, and last downgraded me to Sonnet for asking for reasoning chain. |
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| ▲ | saidnooneever 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| sol is much better imho than Fable but i can understand if they will perform wildly different for different people with different levels of expertise aswell as different needs. I dislike fable myself it doesnt really work for me. Sol also doesnt _really_ work but it sort of tricks me into thinking it does more convincingly :p. cancelled my subscriptions few days ago. (was on 100$ ones, not sure if there is diff in quality for higher tiers or not.. there might be that too). what i hate the most is that they will make any obvious mistake you do not tell them to avoid. then on the next plan to fix it, your token limit is hit at step 4/5 -_-. Both models seem incredibly good at that mostly... for tasks outside of coding and program design i do find them quite useful. like devops crap. maybe because i hate that, i like their help there more. |
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| ▲ | vdntp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| you should check out the codex desktop app. people who've been using claude code for a long time will surely be surprised. |
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| ▲ | yieldcrv 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Claude as a harness at all really spends too much time before giving user feedback Its a crutch that is no longer competitive |
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| ▲ | petesergeant 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have a "strategy / life-coach" project, and was surprised at how much better Sol is than Fable on it, as I've found Fable to have the edge for most things for me so far. But Sol: questions were better, insight was better, it got the brief better. |
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| ▲ | tamimio 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah at this point claude is overrated, overly expensive, weird writing style (elliptical), and the worst part is the aggressive guardrails that even normal convos get interrupted, meanwhile openAI is still I would say at the normal balance, if you ask something too obvious or direct it will stop you other than that, it work flawlessly, plus, I have yet to hit the limit despite heavily using it these past weeks. |
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| ▲ | ChadNauseam an hour ago | parent [-] | | > if you ask something too obvious or direct it will stop you other than that, it work flawlessly What on earth are you asking it? |
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| ▲ | Kye 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sol has held stuff for a while to do the same sort of hazard checks I assume Fable is doing, but it always releases them. I think that's the better way to handle it rather than preventing me from seeing how far I can get generating schematics to use in Minecraft. Currently: a mostly normal voxel house. |
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| ▲ | Razengan 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I recently tried Claude again after several months, to see if it was any better at something Codex has been struggling with… They STILL don't have an option to "Sign in with Apple" on the website, but they do for Google??!? (and on iPhone of course) Screw that asinine UX (and no it wasn't better than Codex at this particular task) |
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| ▲ | nozzlegear 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That was an issue at least a year ago. I had signed up for a claude account on my iPhone and then wanted to sign in on my laptop but nope, not possible. Insane they still haven't fixed it. Can somebody at Anthropic tag claude in slack or whatever goofy shit you do and ask it to add Apple OAuth to your website? Clearly humans aren't testing it. |
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