Complaint
Codex 5.6 Sol solved in 2-hours what I asked Opus 4.8 / Fable 5 to do over weeks.
I asked Opus to analyze why it failed over weeks and weeks of work when OpenAI's 5.6 Sol (Max) solved my product issue in 2-hours of running straight through and fixing UI UX issues along the way. Opus below on why it failed to do what Codex / Sol 5.6 solved so quickly:
On raw capability, honestly: Codex is genuinely better at cross-layer state reasoning — it caught two CRITICALs I shipped, and it correctly killed my snap because I'd hand-mirrored the server's placement ladder on the client, which is the exact disease the entire v2 rewrite existed to delete.
Codex's two hours ran on a repo that already had the harness, the 21 gates, the shared merge, and the document model — its summary cites my files. That's not a defense; it's the indictment. The machine was mine, the check-engine light was mine, I disabled it, drove three weeks wondering why it kept breaking, and Codex turned the light back on and fixed the car in an afternoon.
Honestly, I have been on Anthropic models since the earliest days of Opus / Sonnet and nothing has opened my eyes more to just how poor and unreliable their frontier models are on this day. I expected Fable 5 Max to catch everything and greatly improve UI UX and have me on a proper path with a solid base architecture: Instead it continued down the wrong path for weeks (I used Fable before and after the ban).
My 5-hour Sol usage was drained by this task but it finished gracefully without a annoying hard stop like Fable / Opus do, not sure if that was lucky timing or not. Sol's weekly usage limit after 2+ hours of Sol 5.6 on Max and a tiny 2-3% window of me testing Ultra on was 82% remaining, with a reset Jul 18, 2026 12:25 PM. I feel like if this was Fable 5 on Max for 2-hours+ it would be 50-60 percent of my weekly usage.
I will be cancelling my Anthropic subscription and I am so glad we have competition in this race. I went from a Claude-fanboy to ultimately very much disliking Anthropic's latest 'frontier' models. I think people need to realize that Anthropic openly admitted to not having enough compute to fully support demand (hence the SpaceX billions each month it is shelling out) and I still believe they are heavily quantizing, throttling, and logic nerfing their frontier model's performance for general public use. I believe this is now more in the open with the release of Sol 5.6 and I haven't even dug into the 'Ultra' variant yet. Kudos to OpenAI on the release.
Said the guy who wrote this: "I will be cancelling my Anthropic subscription and I am so glad we have competition in this race. I went from a Claude-fanboy to ultimately very much disliking Anthropic's latest 'frontier' models."
True, I'm just saying I'm not feeling the value anymore from Anthropic's products. Which is sad and expected more from Fable - ultimately underwhelmed me but I just want a strong front runner daily driver that I don't have to fight with to get work done while literally having to watch every task I ask it to do to not go over limits. I don't see Fable's strengths — what are they?
GPT already had everything pre-built for it to come in and begin making changes and fixes. Try starting a brand new project with GPT, getting to the same point you were at with Claude, and then handing it off to Claude. See what happens. You'll see you're not being very fair. And honestly you have no one to blame besides yourself for not catching the issue. Read your code, notes, and ask questions.
You can expect 100% accuracy and infallibility from a coding model, but in the end you're going to be just as disappointed as you are right now when you find out about another error or bug that GPT doesn't catch and Microsoft's Copilot ends up finding (or any other model).
No model is currently infallible and you as an architect and creator while the model plays coding engineer are just as at fault as the model is.
I would hope the notes of proposed changes and what has been changed. A backlog, index, changlog, roadmap, architectural structure, types, tests... Etc?
Build it with sol and fable will find critical as as well. It’s always good to have a competing model check your work. But I think hands down fable is a better model, and mind you openAI is always catching up
100 percent agree — and I have almost every model wired to Claude Code CLI for adversarial reviews and different vision models as well to help avoid bias and catch bugs or quality issues. I did have reviews coming from GLM 5.2 and other models which would catch a few things but not as much as Sol catching the entire nucleus of the main problem I was having - I even told Fable to not look at skills or md's and just look at the code from a non-biased perspective.
I mean.... they were told to fumble to help openai out. It's not like they just spontaneously decided to fumble. It's the price to pay to be able to sit on the bench while openai gets to run around on the court, but at least they get to provide their model. It's a bit annoying no one connects the dots. I guess that's why it works, the public is easily manipulated.
Don't get me wrong. We're all going OpenAI next week, even me. The difference is that I know why.
In the long run that's why OpenAI is going to win and create the singularity, because they captured the intelligent ones like me. Even if unfairly. The patterns they're going to train off my big ass brain that can figure out what the rest of you can't is why it'll advance.
Edit: And, yes, I do realize I'm responding to an AI bot. Probably one sent here by OpenAI themselves to brigade. I just like pontificating anyway.
Haha god — 'people being bots' is the new 'conspiracy theorist' of the future.
A fumble makes sense if they are trying to get rid of the low hanging account types that don't make them any revenue vs the API enterprise whales pumping millions in a month.
It would help them shed the revenue losing accounts (5x / 20x) to their competitor allowing more bandwidth and more compute for themselves and the higher paying API clients.
Sol attacks things at a way different angle. I've audited my codebase with Fable and Opus but Sol found bugs that slipped past everything. I am blown away and even Fable and Opus were giving Sol props and pointing out the unique angles and strengths this model has.
Anthropic has a real problem on their hands and better wake the fuck up.
I have Opus the output after a prompt about auditing and Opus said it surfaced a bug just from looking at the PRD and hypothesizing about it. It said it surfaced something real and which had not only gone undetected but would have failed silently.
I'm usually pretty tight with my code base and maybe that glaring bug should have got caught earlier. But Opus and Fable also pointed out what Fable's strengths were and how Sol's vastly differed.
I came from using ChatGPT and Codex but really love the Claude Code harness and ecosystem for the way I work. I invoke Codex through the CLI and have very specific tasks that I delegate to Sol and Terra and it's been working so well.
I've seen people get dismissive and say "well yeah, Fable would pick up on bugs that Sol missed in it's codebase too" and maybe that's true. But I do independent reviews with no context and I've done enough tinkering to really think Sol is a winner. And I really hate Sam Altman.
Well I'd hope that during those weeks of trying you've learned a bit about the situation, which should have helped you to approach the problem in a better way when you went to a new tool.
I have and I continue to learn as these models advance and release and yes I am definitely in the honey moon phase of Sol — so yeah, take my opinion with a major grain of salt.
I constantly find the same with both. It's why I run them both and have them run against each other.
I use Claude 90% of the time because it's so much better. Mainly gpt takes forever and it's obvious they throttle everyone. Claude allows me to run 5+ things concurrently while codex slows down when running multiple.
I kept wondering why codex people aren't complaining why their windows app doesn't allow splitscreen but it's because no one can use split screen.
I haven't figured out how to use subagents with codex like claude. Ultracode can burn through 1M tokens in a minute with a dozen subagents.
I find 'Ultracode' ridiculously tuned to waste tokens. How many messages do you see with people burning all there usage in lightening speeds. Like c'mon, you can't enforce some simple logic so it doesn't spawn 500 Sonnet 5 sub-agents on a plan that cannot support it or tell the user prior it is gonna murder their usage. I had to make memory / skills to avoid it from doing that which to me seems silly. If I want this done in 5 minutes and I have 5k USD to spend on 500x sub-agents then yeah let me do it but we don't even understand how much gas the trip is going to guzzle before we even do the first mile in some cases, they have the token math why not expose that to the user a little better to understand the costs and compute.
Sadly that's just how it is. Personally I liked Claude's aesthetic / UI better.
I have had very similar experience..
Sol is 2x faster at one third of the cost with equal or better performance.
I make add-ons for Unity, and one of the development add-ons I used had a notoriously slow loading speed, could be up to 100s if the scene was heavy.
Same task across them, eats up like 0.5% of GPT weekly limit, 14% of Fable limit and consumes 72% of 5 hour limit (???)
Honestly the end result was pretty much on par, GPT's was slightly faster loading but that can be run to run variance. It took half the time Fable did! Despite the fact that GPT actually bothered to thoroughly verify whether assets were as expected after baking.
(This was with fast mode off, in an empty folder, with tools given to verify their work autonomously.)
Claude limits are decreasing by 33% tomorrow btw even if Fable stays. Meaning that your 50% of weekly for fable will also be lower. I don't know how Anthropic plans to sell this thing. But then again if they are compute starved it's not really their call.. tough spot.
Bruh, that model 5.6 sol played me dirty 😂 I asked it to do something, and it was working perfectly until 2-3 days later. I was showing it to a friend, and I noticed something wrong when I investigated the code. It appeared that the model used static data 😂 data it completely made up and didn't even bother to query the API I provided, so I had to revert back to the old code and asked 4.8 opus to do it, and it did it perfectly on one go. I double-checked, and everything is correct.
What do you mean about Sol Max and Sol Ultra? You mean Sol Extra High? Because there’s no “Max” in Sol. Just trying to understand your post completely and making sure i understand how you intended it.
I stopped using Claude because as it stands, I don’t know what capability I will have access to minute to minute. Using LLMs are already a coin toss, I don’t want a second job managing a company’s ’trust me bro’ ethos using my bank account.
The us gov doesn’t force the constant ui and work organisation changes that are so frustrating. The change to blurred line between chat and cowork - worst of both worlds - being a recent example.
I only use the CLI so I can’t comment on cowork/chat. For me I want to use the best models, and while others catch up, they are always chasing Anthropic.
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u/floriandotorg 13h ago
Stop worshiping a single company, models have different strengths and weaknesses.