I have no hard data but I have a strong feeling this morning that something's wrong with Fable 5 compared to Friday evening.

Just an hour ago I had Fable correctly identify an unused method that could be deleted. I then immediately get a diff for an exact duplicate method, and then Fable outputting, "I accidentally duplicated <method> instead of deleting it. Removing both copies now."

The remaining morning complaints that makes it feel like something's off is that it will do a lot of "thinking" for simple things that previously took very little time. And it got very lost and completely mixed up DE-91M predicate names and implementations. Just absolute disaster code that I had over the past months come to generally expect it to do without issue.

Glad I carefully review everything. I think what I need is reliability and consistency. But it feels like picking a model from the list doesn't guarantee that: that the models' "brain" is open on the table and they're screwing with it.

It’s load shedding. They’re reducing consumption for capacity balancing at your expense. Whenever there are rate limiting storms Claude gets dumber. They also shift capacity for new releases, and Claude gets dumber leading up to it.

Self run infrastructure won’t have this cost but you have to manage the capacity and rollouts yourself, at which point it’s more obvious what’s happening, but the effects will be the same. The not knowing makes it harder, but also harder to plan your own work around.

The Claude models definitely felt more susceptible to moods, like you could leave them for a few hours, come back and it suddenly was unable to do things which it was doing just earlier, which tellingly is never an experience I've had with an open model.

Honestly I lost patience with Anthropic both clearly messing around with things like this and their agitation over regulation. They aren't good actors, and quite why so many blindly trust them with their company crown jewels is a mystery.

New release of fable and opus 5.5 is pending and Anthropic is reallocating resources. Degradation always happens in transition, it sucks.

Opus 5.5 is being served under opus 5 right now.

I would rather wait in a queue than be routed to a degraded model. And if they _have_ to degrade the models, then I wish they would fucking tell us. Instead, it's "I have a strong feeling".

That we have to guess at this is by far the worst part of the AI era. It feels like a dark cloud over my productivity. It makes my body tense for the entire day when it happens. Not healthy.

Sounds like me without coffee.

> I have no hard data but I have a strong feeling this morning that something's wrong with Fable 5 compared to Friday evening.

Fable is effectively worse than Opus 4.6 now. They severely messed with the model.

If you follow reddit forums for claude code, its common to see people, on the same day, claiming that Opus/Fable is especially smart today, and especially dumb today.

I think people are still not used to non deterministic tools like this, and human perception is absolutely horrible at evaluating trends like this no matter how smart, clever, and experienced you are.

If you have a bank of rigorously tested benchmarks that you run every few days, with enough trials to know what your standard deviation is, and you are getting significant trends over time with those, that would be interesting.

But "I have a feeling" and "Seems like" really isn't a reliable signal at all, humans just can't handle perceiving these things reliably. On top of that changes in your work environment can easily pollute LLMs and change quality of results. Are things getting added to your memory or claude.md files that you don't realize? Is your project growing in size and thus claude is performing worse as more context is needed to work with it? etc etc

Maybe they are jealous of Navier Stokes and try the Hodge conjecture with 80% of total compute at the expense of their customers.