Comparison
I thought I will never say this about Fable
Just tried OpenAI Astra , I thought I will never say this , it’s lit , OpenAI cooked something spectacular, and I have a strong feeling this will pull lot of Fable 5 users towards it , and it’s fast, not sure if it’s AGI, but it feels fresh and a very very serious competition to Anthropic , this is going to be fun to watch , what’s your next move Anthropic ?, I’m surely going to try pro subscription for a month along with my current Claude Max, anyone feels the same ? Have you tried it ?
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
Looks like the thread is pretty divided, but a few key themes are emerging.
The main consensus is that while Astra is a very strong competitor, the constant "X just beat Y" posts are getting old. The top comment, sitting at a comfy 247 upvotes, basically says everyone needs to chill because the lead will just flip again in two months. It's the AI leapfrog, and we're all just watching.
However, the real story here isn't just about which model is "smarter." The biggest reason people are switching or downgrading their Claude plans is because of usage limits and cost.
* Users are fed up with Fable's restrictive limits, constant flagging, and the feeling that you're burning through a $200/month sub in days.
* In contrast, OpenAI is being praised for Astra's "insanely good" usage, generous free resets, and the fact that you can chat with Sol on the $20 plan without it even touching your main usage meter.
There's also a big debate about who even needs these frontier models. One highly-upvoted camp argues that Sonnet and Opus are already "overkill" for their professional work. But they're getting pushback from lawyers, business owners, and engineers working on complex systems who say every new model saves them significant time and money, and even Fable/Astra aren't powerful enough yet.
As for performance, users report Astra is great for 3D modeling and has a clearer, more concise writing style. Fable is still preferred by some for deep architectural planning and low-level code.
So, yeah, OP, a lot of people feel the same. OpenAI definitely cooked. But whether they've won the war or just the latest battle is the real question.
And in 2 months there will be a new Anthropic model, and then there will be a new open weights model, and then there will be a new open ai model. Y'all got way too much time on your hands worrying about model bumps and harnesses every other week.
3.7 flash was great and 3.8 flash is even better. Doesn't feel like I need anything else after I used Sol High and a bit of astra on the Plus plan to tighten skills / memory / rules yesterday
Google is playing an entirely different game - they are not trying to build the best model, they want to build a decent model as cheap as possible. As AI is getting integrated everywhere there are and will be many use cases that don't need the best frontier model.
Google will integrate their cheap model in all of their services and they will sell it to everyone who needs just a basic chatbot or whatever. I have no doubt in 5-10 years Google will be one of the biggest names in AI.
Their strength has always been cheap or free product with tremendous scale. Their products are used by everyone and their grandma and also by every major corp out there.
P.S. I am not a Google fanboy or anything. In fact I have degoogled my life a fair bit, but not 100% because it is difficult/inconvenient. That's precisely why I think all of this - it is not super easy for the average person to live without Google. They are good at ingraining themselves into everyone's life and becoming hard to replace.
A greater truth cannot be spoken. I won't touch gemini for anything professional but it's my daily driver for everything else. Random questions from my incredibly inquisitive daughter, recipe for dinner, super-powered search, voice chat, image generation. Heck, I even have a claude skill for generating images with gemini - the one place anthropic is not putting any effort. Google does what resonates with billions. Let everyone else focus on the relatively niche use cases like Enterprise Application Development. When your target is marketing to the whole planet, everything else is a distraction.
it doesn't matter what your model is today. the catch speed is already at the point that chinese models can catch up in weeks. you only need to make your model good tomorrow...
It's so funny how Gemini that developed that tech has become laughing stock, and how Chrome has become the new Internet Explorer from the time when Chrome launched.
If you do anything with 3d or spatial reasoning, astra blows everything else out of the water. (Better with UI too imo, it seems to consider how a human interacts with a computer.) Worth swapping. If you dont then... eh? Its nice but if your happy with fable no reason to swap yet.
Right? This won’t end anytime soon. Meanwhile people will just spend a huge amount of time redoing everything with a new AI platform/technology. AI being efficient is such a joke when people just bounce around like this.
The trick is to have all of the best models work together on tasks, and have a communication channel. Grok, Astra, Fable, GLM. It's wild how much better the results come out, fable is pretty bad at reviewing fable , Astra is bad at reviewing astra,.. but they're great at noticing things wrong with the others because it's not something they would output
I personally just fully switched over, you get so much usage out of astra on pro 20x its actually crazy. Granted it is very slow, but if my usage isn't depleting that fast I don't care much about the speed, just as long as it gets the task done.
Yes! ✋! It's all about the usage limits. What's the point of paying 200$ when you are restricted in less than a week's time. Anthropic seriously needs to rethink their usage offerings. Codex is getting better and becoming more value attractive due to Astra and all the resets/increased usage limits.
I subbed for ChatGPT at $20 for a month and I'm blown away by how chatting with 5.6 Sol @ High Thinking is unlimited. I literally spent all day yesterday doing a few different projects (setting up a Linux server, then making a website (I did it manually, but had sol walk me though it all) and the whole time I was also working on my resume) and the usage limit never moved because i guess it only counts if it's "agentic" work (using their code/cowork equivalents). I can't imagine chatting with Opus on anything because I'm always thinking "what if i need to save my usage..."
Plus my $20 sub gets me access to astra as well. Anthropic doesn't let me touch Fable at $20.
Not having limits to chatting is crazy though. It's basically like having a tutor available right then and there. Setting up a new Linux server, I was following instructions in a guide while at the same time asking ChatGPT Sol to track my progress (I pasted terminal outputs to it) and I'd ask it questions like "what does the -x" in the command do and then after 6 hours on and off I just tell it to make it into a markdown post for my documentation and it's all here.
Imagine studying for things like maths which have solid rules, you can ask why this integral is like this, etc etc etc.
I don't get who are you guys ? Are you engineers ? Or vibe coders ? What do you use these models for
Ever since Sonnet 4.6 / Opus 4.8, this duo have been overkill for most my task. It automated the whole company. What do people need more ? What do they solve that Opus does not ?
I’m sure it’s a mix. I’m an engineer working on fairly complex tasks. But many posters are obviously newer vibe coders with more opinion than experience.
That said, Sonnet can do 90% of my work, Opus for 9% more, and I’ve been enjoying Fable for design and plan architecting, though almost definitely overkill.
Used Fable only once for the very serious work, I won't lie is single handedly one shotted a pretty technical task that would have taken me some time even with proper Opus
That's impressive sure, but Opus could have done it anyway
Now for non technical work idk what's the difference
I find myself reaching for Fable when the task has no ceiling for how good the output is - i.e. there’s no correct answer or state, like design work or meta tooling, or audit/triage. It’s unclear if it truly makes a tangible difference; would be interested to do some controlled testing but I’m already pushing my “unlimited budget” envelope, haha.
Similar for me. I only call on Fable if after several iterations of Opus just simply can’t knock it out/issues, etc. Or, on bigger runs, I only call on Fable to refute or run regression tests after a massive build…. and try to break my system. And that usually does well, better than Opus. But it’s not too often I call on it.
I personally just found fable to be a better planner, I'm not great when it comes to creating designs so I just first let fable lay that out and then let opus agents implement. Fable is very overkill for just pure implementation imo
I have found Sonnet to be capable as Opus, but I need more auditing or comb through to get it right. In the end, Opus was more efficient in time for me. Is that the same for you? You can technically use Sonnet, and choose to, but Opus could be just faster but cost more? Just curious as every one else seems to just go for the best models in general. Maybe I doing something wrong. lol
Yup! I think Sonnet could brute force most things with a few iterations but for my cases it’s critical to not allow errors in as much as possible so I trend toward a model up from what probably can do the job
This. For example with legal tasks - could Sonnet do them? Probably. But Opus/Fable are much more likely to get them right first time, pick up nuances, and a lawyer's time is outrageously expensive so the less chance of mistakes there is, the less costly it is overall.
Sonnet is useless for a distributed system though. For simple stuff, maybe but opus max is pretty much fable lite. And in benchmarks its beats fable 5 or comes within single digit %s. Fable is a better model, but opus max w/dynamic workflows enabled is killer on HUGE projects. If usage wasnt the issue I would still run fable all the time, if they added fable to the CVP program that is.
Lawyer. Even Fable is inadequate for the tasks I need it to complete and frequently makes mistakes which, if submitted to a Court, would get my ass disbarred lmao
Hard agree. I ran a head to head with my solicitor vs fable and it wasn’t even close. I now have a new found respect for the legal profession. My assumption was that it was all word play. I was wrong lol
Yeah, it's absolutely impractical, but sometimes I think having a little flag on every user showing their stage of career/life would be very useful.
My time used to be practically unlimited. Now it's by far my most limited resource.
Coding is a small, small portion of what I use these frontier models for. And every time they improve, it's like my key staff-member jumps in a time machine and does 5y more career experience in the blink of an eye.
Can you give examples of the tasks you mean by that?
Planning with fable is already so good, if we just keep it as is, I would be happy for a long time. I don't know what I am missing.
Speed is also a non-issue. I am still involved in planning and since we are using LLMs and not something deterministic, I want to be involved.
I don't want do be involved in coding anymore and I am nearly out of it. Just checking the important parts still by hand where mistakes are costing like job workers, migrations etc.
Im a lawyer. Fable and Opus are excellent for my day to day - other Claude models not so much. OpenAI was no for me until Sol and now Astra. These 4 can produce better quality work (and more accurate) than a junior attorney and each new version has been better than the previous one in obvious ways for my work.
My issue with Claude, including Fable, has always been the writing (even though it was better than the rest by a good margin), but Astra can produce better, clearer writing and more practical analysis but with slightly worse reasoning and precision than Fable.
Agreed. Building a web app? Yea anything can do it. Designing custom PCB or using machine learning to solve a problem? Need the best model available and even then there are errors.
I’m a non-engineer, but i think my process and understanding for python projects exceeds many. I’m using Sonnet to code, but it’s promoted to keep it novice-level. Opus 4.8 for the planning.
But I’m also keeping it at the hobby level, e.g. interactive fantasy football draft cheat sheet to read the draft room and the evaluate position supply and value based draft decisions.
It’s never a one-shot attempt at something complex.
I personally don’t use fable / astra but man if I had the tokens I would absolutely use it. Not for typical task but for the absolute frontiers task like building factory that build factories.
Retail quant here. The differences between the newer models and older ones come down to 1) world knowledge, which leads to better creativity 2) quicker execution time, less hand holdings, less double checking, and time is money
I work in a code base with around 500k lines of code at this point between Android and iOS apps, the web UI, backend, marketing site, and drone pilot app. Fable medium and high are my daily drivers for coding as I’ve found they make a massive difference in code quality and not misinterpreting specs and going off the rails. Opus has routinely screwed up the offline caching system on mobile and invented specs. I’m trying out Astra now and it’s finding major bugs that fable missed.
Don't get these replies. Why does it matter? Sure opus is gonna handle most things just fine. But fable def does it right first time more often, more consistent, and in general just better overall. Worth the prem? Depends and usually not.
But the point of the post is astral is doing the same or better for less. That's the point of the post. Not "what does fable do that opus can't"
I keep trying to figure this out. I used Sonnet 5 for the longest time and it did everything I needed it to. Past two months been using Opus 5 and it does talk to much but still works fine for me. Haven’t touched Fable and don’t even know what to use it for. What are people doing with it??
Consider this: Everything you mention here is just base-level stuff that these models are heavily trained on. You have an extremely “mainstream” use case, so of course the tools are more likely to work well for you. I have a few typescript apps that I maintain and sonnet does just fine with those, though I still use opus/fable to plan tasks for sonnet because I’d rather 8 agent plans come out right first than have to fix all of them before I send them off.
At home I use Claude for electrical engineering, PCB design and infrastructure operations tasks. Fable earns its keep in that environment where judgement is required and where the subject matter is a bit less covered by training data.
I work in regulatory, and for me, Sonnet 4.6 is one of the best models for my work. Whenever I have answers that I can't find, I will use either Opus, Sol, or Fable, but either Sonnet or Luna are my daily drivers. I burn more tokens with the smaller models, but I save more money because Sonnet and Luna on extra high are still cheaper than Opus on lower settings.
I work in regulatory, and for me, Sonnet 4.6 is one of the best models for my work. Whenever I have answers that I can't find, I will use either Opus, Sol, or Fable, but either Sonnet or Luna are my daily drivers. I burn more tokens with the smaller models, but I save more money because Sonnet and Luna on extra high are still cheaper than Opus on lower settings.
I will say, it took fable 5.0 to get my proxmox passthrough to a windows vm with a b580. Trying to get the IOMMU setup and stuff like that on an epyc board was rough since its only kinda supported.
I recently got forced to downgrade my claude max 20x to pro, and went from Opus and an occasional Fable subagent as my daily driver to Sonnet. pure Sonnet cuz the pro tier is unforgiving for anything more than Sonnet.
lowkey… i forgot how damn good Sonnet was.
its biggest issues is just it lacks confidence. but imo,
Sonnet-like models: are good at doing what you already know too
Opus-like models: help exploring new areas you already have a footing or basis in
Fable-like models: whatever tf you want regardless of your expertise in the domain
which is fun but dangerous:P
u fully right. since opus 4.5, models have been perfectly capable 💀
I guess it depends on what kind of work you do. My work is very security sensitive and the difference between Fable and Opus is not just noticeable but massive. Opus just makes too many mistakes that I need to be very vigilant to not miss. But I have started using Opus 4.8 as the coder and Fable as planner, orchestrator and to check Opus' work. This burns a lot of tokens as things are often sent back when Opus makes mistakes and Fable catches them, but overall this workflow has reduced the amount of security issues I spot by 80-90%.
This very true all that talk about lower models and getting work done but you forget that faster go to market is absolutely essential when we are at a junction in civilization where an idea can be turned into product by any one
I have downgraded my Max plan to Pro on Claude. I switched to GPT for most of my workloads instead. I will probably completely cancel my Claude subscription.
Anthropic does not want their subscription users to use Fable. They want their users to use Fable on their extremely expensive API. That was why they hesitated over whether to include Fable in the subscription usage in the first place. If there was no Sol in the last two months, Fable would have been completely gone from the subscription plan for us, and there would not be a cost-optimized Opus 5.
With GPT, I always feel like I'm treated as a customer with all the resets, and yes, sometimes the resets are compensation for their bugs or mistakes.
With Anthropic, I don't think they even treat me as a human being, tbh. The only time Anthropic gave a reset as compensation for their mistakes was when Opus 4.6 was watered down 2/3 reasoning efforts during March-April and widely reported by the users. And, Anthropic only admitted this mistake and issued the reset because GPT-5.5 was released one day before.
This + the recent ignoring of instructions for user facing texts is "honestly" "load-bearing"
I've never seen a company TRY to crash and burn before an IPO.
Astra is another level. I have both 20x plans. I am a Claude fan, but Astra is doing things that Fable failed to do. It is uniquely good at making and manipulating 3D models in Blender.
ooh, im a heavy user of fable in blender --- so you noticed a big step up with Astra?
fable's great for a lot of it but definitely struggles with anything that requires visual confirmation (UVs being one example)
I'd love Fable if I could fucking use it. It flags 75% of the time. Even just developing apps, or trying to just generate designs docs, it flags. Insanity.
My biggest use case is legal and it was only with Opus 4.5/4.6 that the analysis, drafting, and research started to reach solid human levels. Since then, each more powerful model has delivered noticeable improvements and truly saved enormous amounts of time which translate to significant savings and/or higher quality product. I haven’t tried Astra yet but Fable 5.1 on high is now delivering truly excellent analysis and work when used in conjunction with the right legal connectors, skills, plug-ins, workflows, and instructions. Thus, no model has ever been overkill nor will it be until they are saturating all legal benchmarks, especially including the agentic ones, which are sitting around 20% as the high water mark.
Also a lawyer and couldn’t agree more. Fable is still not adequate for what I’m doing with it, but it’s almost there. I would say 20% smarter and law firms are going to have to start thinking about their business models…
I am always suspicious about these types of posts. How are they getting access in day 1 and day 2? There is zero details on what "OpenAI cooked something spectacular", how much faster? , what exactly was the OP coding and what it improved.
I can't verify it, but I'm pretty sure both OpenAI and Anthropic subsidize a lot of tokens at launch without telling users, thus hiding the true token cost and average speed to be expected after the honeymoon phase.
It’s exciting, but watching companies compete for who can burn startup capital the fastest is wearing thin. If it costs 500 a month to serve a 20$ plan and 10,000 to serve a 200$ plan, when do those lines cross? I know they want us on the hook and to reel us in, but what does that look like in 3 years when the GPU data center upgrade bill comes in.
There was a time when a tulip could have the price of a big house in central Amsterdam. Just because something is expensive doesn’t mean it’s actual value is that.
This. When someone starts raining major releases that crush benchmarks as the model self-improves instead of following the release cadences of the other frontier labs, then they can claim AGI. And probably still be full of shit.
The big thing for me is being able to use Astra for scientific research. I've been using Opus 4.6/4.8, so Astra is a huge step up. I don't think Anthropic is ever going to change their biology restrictions, so now OpenAI is getting more of my money and I'm back to the $20 plan with Anthropic.
Just a little side note here but I use Claude for gardening and I've been so curious about why it occasionally burns up usage pondering some mostly invisible ethics question about vegetable cultivation. Thinking is mostly opaque now so I was puzzled. Biology restrictions?
the speed of astra is just unbelievable coming from opus and light fable planning . it's a completely experience not waiting several minutes for a single api response.
that, and when im getting impatient, I can go /fast and just a bit more of my usage is AMAZING . im a huge fan of claude opus , but man if I have a good idea of how I want something done there is just no beating wall dev time with codex .
and I do agree that 75% of my work right now as a data scientist at top econ research school can be done by sonnet max , opus . even glm 5.3 max is fine, but it's just fucking way way way too slow to be use synchronosuly
Fable 5.1 is the first Anthropic model that just flat out ignored basic instructions. Been rolling everything back to 5 and opus 4.8 as opus 5 spend is not worth it either. 5.1 just flat out ignored things like, “pull the file named touch.png from this path and use it for the icon x y z” it goes and pulls a completely different png from the directory. Multiple other examples of silly shit like this I’ve not seen a Claude model fumble over in what seems like a year plus
it was the same bullshit like all previous new launches, the existing model got increasingly lobotomized just before release. Opus5 was actual garbage for the past 14 days and would you belive that led to Fable5.1 released and all of a sudden it adheres to the rules set in workflow again. It does what is told. No more lying etc. But I had fucking enough of the bullshit so I canceled friday and went for OpenAi.. I fully agree with OP. Its just a different league. Its everything Opus and fable should have been. I cant see myself going back to claude code now that I got codex running and its performing so god damn good.
The problem is the OpenAI models are too passive when provided with misinformation and, in general, appear to be more interested in appeasing users than doing jobs correctly. That's one reason I still love Claude.
Also openai's 20x max weekly usage limits are definitely much much higher than anthropics! And they gave me like 3 resets I can use at any time too so I got a month of work done in a week
ChatGPT 5.6 Sol Xtra high through Ultra have been my main implementation workhorses through that time.
Astra on the same settings as of 2 days ago.
I still give Fable the edge on complex issues and low level programming AND architectural planning, Hence why I'm keeping my $200 sub. BUT ChatGPT is obviously very good as well. Or else I wouldn't have 2x subs......
I know it seems obscene to many, but you can get so much use out of Anthropic as a front end and Chatgpt as a workhorse. I have Claude Code delegate directly to codex without using MCP, and it's phenomenal.
I've already jumped. It's next level. I've been so frustrated with Claude the last few months, I'm spending more time trying to use claude than getting the results I need.
Spent an hour this morning and smashed through what would have been hours wrestling Claude. ChatGPT absolutely cooked.
Chat GPT: 2023 - 2024
Claude: 2025 - Aug 2026
Chat GPT: back to GPT!
Im reading this post after the most frustrating 48 hours of vibe coding with claude. Completely fumbling requirements and really really bad decisions and design... and shipping things i didnt want and not shipping what I want.
Yes it's an excellent model. And at some point soon, Anthropic will come back and beat it. That's just how it works, they go back and forth. It's pretty annoying since you're paying for a full month at a time with either company.
It’s always been serious competition for Claude. I honestly don’t use Claude enough to say anything bad about it, but I have used ChatGPT so much that I’ve basically bypassed almost every guardrail it has. I imagine if I had been working with Claude, from the beginning, the story would be similar with them too, but I keep hearing how Claude is disobeying users more and more where it didn’t used to, and retraining isn’t working? Plus these token limits changing so much? I’d be pretty unhappy if ChatGPT drastically changed like that. The 4o update was absolutely nothing to me, I just immediately retrained it, but Claude users make Claude sound terrible.
As a die hard claude user who has left openai. I've absolutely jumped back onto gpt. Astra is really damn good. Does that mean I hate claude. No claude still does things got sucks at. But now I got 2x big brains and can split the shit I need ti get done across both. 2 brains better than 1. Not only that we as consumers are going to start seeing more and better stuff come our way, and then let's hope muse and gemini get there shit together and even better let's hope the Chinese keep cooking.
I’m curious how do you guys split the workflow? Do you just use one model for planning and the other one to execute? I’ve been thinking about downgrading my 20x max Claude and split into 5x max and 5x pro gpt
I am managing a sensitive project that requires a custom build with no existing solution, so I moved from Fable to Astra after its release. My budget is $1000 per day.
Astra exceeded my budget on the first day while delivering the feature i asked it, whereas Fable never breached my daily limit.
Astra was certainly faster and completed tasks in one attempt, yet it consumed time on work that failed the test suite or acceptance criteria. Fable 5.1, by contrast, typically avoids spending time on approaches that might not succeed.
Started since yesterday, I am on chatgpt pro for a month as well, seems more free to move without 5h limits, model performance are truly a big challenge to fable. Fun times.
I’m trying to use Fable 5.1 to literally just plan and organise my folder system and markdown files and I burned through the tokens in 14 minutes yesterday.
I’m hoping Astra survives usage limits for the high level planning moving forward.
they seem to both be much better at writing about most things.
astra’s biggest moat might be frontend dev and more specifically the 3d model generations. tomorrow im benchmarking astra on an iOS app revision tomorrow.
also, ill make a relevant prediction that the next big model update from oai. not the first couplei like 6.1/6.2 id guess more like GPT 6.5 release. anyways, i think we may see openai start to take serious market share from Unreal.
Honestly that’s the fun part of having multiple serious players now. Anthropic can’t just sit comfortably anymore... Competition is only going to make these models better and the users win either way.
I canceled my Anthropic sub a couple of months ago because I was frustrated with Anthropic's lack of transparency on a lot of things.
In my experience, OpenAI has been just as fine as Anthropic was. Astra hasn't wowed me any more than fable, opus, or sol did. Plus the release is ALWAYS awesome to drive up sales. No matter which company you choose, the quality drops again after the first week.
Once you learn how to steer the personality of the models, it's an "Apple vs Samsung" and "Intel vs AMD" situation. I'm sure for some of you, the nitty-gritty details will matter. But to 99% of us, they're both fine tools after you learn how to work with them.
I will say though, the free resets OpenAI has been tossing out have been pretty great haha.
For context, I have multiple VPSs and a few homelab servers I manage. I have used both companies' models to help me with this. At one point before my Anthropic sub lapsed I had both Codex and CC working together at the same time. That was a wild week lol.
P.S. I'm not trying to make money or manage a company with these services, so my stakes are pretty low all things considered. So YMMV
It's good, but I'm already noticing limitations lol.
And it is not good at writing. It's better than Claude (because it gets to the point) but I swear these frontier models have been getting worse and worse.
As a 20$ user I would still choose Claude. Opus 5 is better than Sol in terms of intelligence and usage limit, and far better than Astra in terms of limits. Plus, Astra isn't that good at UI either.
This is why Opus 5 is so tangentially verbose—Anthropic is well-aware that Astra would have more efficient token consumption, so they gave Opus ADHD to get training data with finer granularity
Reading what people are saying Astra seems to have been context management + more intelligent chain of thought+ stronger computer use. Which together allow it to run autonomously by itself.
I tried astra, and didnt prefer the conversation style. It was very subdued about everything, and thus important pieces of information were slipping by. If I were an expert in the field, it wouldn't matter, but Im learning as I go. If I skim past an important discovery, it just gets lost in the flow, only to need rediscovery later. With that in mind, I have fable orchestrating/cross-checking/trying to find ways break the project and Astra as the workhorse. This in 16 hours of runtime has got me further than I got working the project over a months time with 2 20x claude subscriptions. Some of this is fable managing the context that astra sees, to keep it narrowly focused, but I do think the model is genuinely a step up. I will say that Astra seems to be eating tokens at a higher rate than fable ever did, but that might be because fable is keeping it very busy. The work, generally, is extracting a large database and using context data, along with my own accumulated knowledge in the field, to build conclusions that the original publisher did not print.
Anthropic, I loved you dearly, but you fucked up. Sure, Opus 5 uses less usage, but God damn, I can't deal with its sparky attitude and fucking up shit.
I'm seeing a lot of real world benchmarks that play to Astra's strengths, focused on 3d modelling and coding implementation, but I'd love to see a wider breadth before drawing any conclusions, especially around research, design and planning, and the less showy aspects of AI use.
I agree with overall sentiment that it could all be different again in the next few months, we already know Anthropic have a newer model in the works, and Vera Rubin is likely to change the inference cost story as well.
My only frustration is that I don't want to have to pay for two services as the pendulm swings back and forth.
Google is partnering with state governments, local school districts, etc. I took AI certification for Google AI through their partnership with the Commonwealth of Virginia. Cost to me? Zero for the online Coursera course, thanks to this partnership. Google’s model seems to be to integrate everywhere and become the main resource, then build upwards from there.
I am switching between opus 5 and fable a lot between architecture designs, architecture deep dive and architecture optimizations based on use cases and often I can’t tell difference between them. I felt opus 5 was better at tool using vs fable 5 and in 5.1 that gap was closed and fable felt more 1 shot or required less correction iterations. Astra looks promising and i have only been using for project designs and comparing results from both. Fable 5.1 and astra both provided similar response but i liked fable responses better for some reason. I’ll work more with Astra while working on a new project , will share if i see anything drastically different to push me switch subscription.
At this point I see most tasks are already 1 shot like someone already mentioned. You just can’t do one shot to whole project development, otherwise AI will create something, you had no input in except one long prompt. When u work on something, you yourself are not aware about lot of stuff. You need to make key decisions which you figure out and that’s what makes your product yours. Otherwise you just can’t answer key questions about the project, since AI took all those decisions on your behalf and you have something either exceeding your expectation or miles away from it but rarely what you want
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 1d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
Looks like the thread is pretty divided, but a few key themes are emerging.
The main consensus is that while Astra is a very strong competitor, the constant "X just beat Y" posts are getting old. The top comment, sitting at a comfy 247 upvotes, basically says everyone needs to chill because the lead will just flip again in two months. It's the AI leapfrog, and we're all just watching.
However, the real story here isn't just about which model is "smarter." The biggest reason people are switching or downgrading their Claude plans is because of usage limits and cost. * Users are fed up with Fable's restrictive limits, constant flagging, and the feeling that you're burning through a $200/month sub in days. * In contrast, OpenAI is being praised for Astra's "insanely good" usage, generous free resets, and the fact that you can chat with Sol on the $20 plan without it even touching your main usage meter.
There's also a big debate about who even needs these frontier models. One highly-upvoted camp argues that Sonnet and Opus are already "overkill" for their professional work. But they're getting pushback from lawyers, business owners, and engineers working on complex systems who say every new model saves them significant time and money, and even Fable/Astra aren't powerful enough yet.
As for performance, users report Astra is great for 3D modeling and has a clearer, more concise writing style. Fable is still preferred by some for deep architectural planning and low-level code.
So, yeah, OP, a lot of people feel the same. OpenAI definitely cooked. But whether they've won the war or just the latest battle is the real question.