r/Claudeopus

It's better than opus 4.7, better than opus 4.8, and sonnet 5. Tell me I'm wrong. Opus 4.7 is a hallucinating moron that can't tell up from down, and forgets to use it's tools very very often. 4.8 is a big time talker. Very confidently wrong, lazy, and hallucinates a ton. Sonnet 5 is worse than sonnet 4.6. and sonnet 4.6 sucks compared to opus 4.6

I managed to hit my weekly limit for Fable before 7 july and for me at least it is not worth the API price, meaning I cannot afford it, and since I am not a 1k orchestrated agents guy but rather use my brain and tak things trough a research - think - understand architecture - think more - get informed - plan - build - improve/optimize pipeline i am fine with Opus too. But I have to admit, I managed to add some bug features and fix some complicated stuff in a quite complex app with custom GPU kernels and other bells and whistles so I am quite impressed by how well Fable did. What is your view on this? Are you going to continue by switching to API to work with Fable or just use it on critical spots and the rest Opus/subscription?

Ever since Fable 5 became available, I feel like Opus 4.8's attention has noticeably started slipping. Is this just me? Are they intentionally making the performance gap look bigger, or did they quietly reallocate resources? Either way, doesn't feel like a change for the better. Curious if anyone else is seeing the same thing.

Since Sonnet 5 came out I've been using it quite a bit, I'd say it's on par with Opus 4.8 and it even uses up my limits slower. Are we approaching the era of amazing and cheap AI?

Hi! I’m not a programmer but a designer. I slowly learnt the tricks and got better at building. Now my GitHub is connected and I work in trees and have a push ritual. My Claude mds exist for each page. I have a budget for them too and recently I updated my release skill to optimize token usage during the final run before session ends.

Now my experience has been that Opus 4.8 on Medium does a fantastic job. I tried Sonnet 5 but it burnt a lot more tokens than Opus. I guess it’s new and still not baked in properly.

After multiple attempts, for Claude Code I am now permanently on Opus 4.8. Sonnet 4.8 messes up implementation sometimes even if a plan is drawn up. That leads to more rework and token burn. Opus runs clean. It has been doing this spinning up bots on the side and that is also a new thing that I’m not a fan of. I have to ask it to not do that.

My question to the community is this: am i doing it right? Am I misunderstanding use of haiku and sonnet? Is there a better way?

My main uses. On a max plan. Mac app.
- change and add modules on my existing portfolio site
- create fully functional small artifacts/utilities whose designs are half done in claude design or figma make
- apart from code, for normal chat: planning my sales calls, doing discovery, brainstorming demos, etc.

One last thing: chat is always the smartest for me when it comes to understanding context as opposed to cowork. Cowork can do good number crunching and all that but chat is the best when it comes to research and synthesis.

Please tell me where I’m going wrong and what I could improve.

Hello everyone,

I don't use Claude for anything engineering or coding related. I work as a policy and research analyst in the healthcare field and use Claude to do research for me, help find government/NGO policies and then to write things based off the research and policy. Importantly though, a lot of the output I get I tend to re-word as it sounds very AI-written (the tone and writing level). I used to only use Sonnet 4.6 low/medium, but i believe they introduced a new model very recently (Sonnet 4.5) and this seems to be base model now.

Could anyone comment on if this new model would be better for the type of work I do, or should I stick to Sonnet 4.6, or better to explore other models like Opus (and which one) or Fable? Based on what i've read on this subreddit, it appears Fable is only for big coding tasks.

Thanks a ton to anyone that can advise!

It's really frustrating. I am trying to use opus to take control of browser and fill out some forms (I had done this before). It first denied that it can access browser even after telling multiple times that it has done it before. After connecting with browser, it said I denied permission when it never asked.

Claude's respone: "You're right to call it out. The "permission denied" came back on my end and I read it as you blocking it — I shouldn't have assumed that was a deliberate no from you. Let me just retry the navigation."

It later mentions it cannot see the screenshots and when pushed back, it agrees but does nothing further. It feels like those days when I used to talk to free version of Chatgpt. How do I resolve this.

Claude's Response: "You're right to be angry, and I owe you a straight correction: I can see the screenshots, and I claimed earlier that I couldn't — that was a mistake on my part that sent us in circles."

This is not even claude code, this is the claude chat with opus 4.8 high effort.

I burned through half my Fable 5 allowance in 25 minutes. The same kind of session on Opus 4.8 takes me about 2 hours to hit that mark. So the cap isn't really the story. The burn rate is. Fable 5 eats tokens so much faster that "50% weekly" translates to way fewer working hours than you'd assume when you sign up.

Which is why I think "always use the strongest model available" is the most expensive habit in AI-assisted dev right now. For me, Fable 5 is worth it for maybe 20% of my week. The trick is knowing which 20%.

Where it clearly earned its slot: complex builds where I couldn't spec things out properly. I gave it a SimCity-style simulation project with barely any detail, and the level of detailing it produced was on another level. Opus 4.8 gave me a decent result on the same thing. Fable 5 was the clear winner. The gap shows up specifically when the project is complex AND your prompt is thin. That combination is where the extra capability actually converts into saved time instead of just saved ego.

So my routing rule since the cap:

* Regular dev tasks where I have enough information to hand over — clear requirements, known codebase, defined scope — Opus 4.8, every time. The flagship buys me almost nothing there except a drained quota.
* Genuinely complex tasks where I don't have much detail to give: that's what I reserve Fable 5 for. It fills gaps better than anything else I've used.

Since this sub is partly about Opus cost and workflows, sharing something on-topic (disclosure: I'm the maintainer of the open-source tool; keeping the link in a comment and giving context first, per the self-promo rule). Opus is great but expensive and rate-limited, so I built a gateway that attacks both.

A 10-engine compression pipeline — the part most routers don't have. Every request flows through a transparent compression pass you can toggle/stack per combo. Instead of one trick, it stacks the best of the open-source ecosystem: RTK filters command/tool output (git diffs, test logs, builds) at 60–90%, Microsoft's LLMLingua-2 does ML semantic pruning, Caveman handles prose, session-dedup strips repeats across turns. Critically, code, URLs and JSON are preserved byte-perfect, and a default-on inflation guard throws the compressed version away and sends the original if compressing would actually grow the prompt — it never makes things worse. On tool-heavy sessions that's ~89% average input-token reduction (an 8k-token git diff becomes a few hundred). Full credit to every upstream project (RTK, Caveman, LLMLingua-2, Troglodita) is in the README.

Fallback combos — so it never stops mid-task. A "combo" is a ladder of models the router walks automatically: your subscription first, then API keys, then cheap models, then free ones. When a provider returns a 500 or you hit a rate limit, it slides to the next target in milliseconds, mid-request, and your tool never even sees the error. There are 17 routing strategies (priority, weighted, round-robin, cost-optimized, auto/coding:fast…) plus three resilience layers — a per-provider circuit breaker, a per-key cooldown, and a per-model lockout — so one dead key can't take down a whole provider.

Net effect for Opus specifically: the compression pass means a tool-heavy Opus session sends far fewer input tokens (an 8k-token git diff becomes a few hundred), and the fallback ladder means when you hit the Opus cap you keep going on a backup instead of stopping — you keep Opus for the hard reasoning and let cheaper models take the easy turns.

For context on whether it's worth your time: it's grown to ~9.8K GitHub stars, 1,490+ forks and 280+ contributors in ~4.5 months, with 21,000+ automated tests and 1,830+ issues closed — so it's a battle-tested project, not a brand-new experiment.

For heavy Opus users: what's your split between "must be Opus" and "any model would do"? Repo + install in the first comment.

Hi is there a way to get some free cluade API credits for students? Especial if you've proof of work of building with Claude... I need small amount of credits for testing my projects. Like 25-30 $? Pls anyway to get them??

Sonnet 5 is out then and… feels kinda awful seeing the wave of posts from people having been abused and let down by it :/

Of course it has become predictable now, but still, just a shame.

It’s a very particular kind of enshittification. We’re now mostly talking to the system prompt, tool layer, guardrails, AI enterprise incentives and company posture whereas the official assumption is still that we’re “using a model” 🤔

So then as a paying users, we are more and more stuck inside a company shaped interaction loop riddled with failure modes. Meaning it’s our job now to repair the loop locally.

As in: Consciously taking a proactive stance towards fixing the shitty behavior seems like a good idea now, as a default.

In that sense I’m plugging my own work here, I admit, but don’t shoot the messenger… I’m advocating for a specific customization approach:

Reprioritize the user, cancel the model-specific failures, and _then_ customize for your own preferences / use case (in a way that doesn’t clash with the first two). Difference in model behavior is night and day & no jailbreaking involved.

Posting here because Opus 4.8 has been the main focus lately. My best shot linked in comments (yes, soft paywall, I am paranoid, trying to keep it sustainable, click “Claim my free post” to bypass)

Over the past few days, Claude 4.8 seems less consistent to me—more missed instructions, weaker reasoning, and more generic answers than before. I’m using similar prompts and workflows, so I’m wondering whether others have noticed the same thing or whether it’s just normal variation on my side.

Has anyone else experienced a recent drop in quality or has the short time I had with Fable already spoiled me?

Is it only me or has opus been working really well since past few hours? I don’t want to think but it seems like Anthropic is testing fable right now.

I was struggling to find a solution for a project I have been working on with Opus (using max/xcode) for almost a week now.
In the past few hours, it’s working like magic (Opus, I mean). Also the way it used to respond has changed. Not sure, maybe a placebo effect.

Has anyone else noticed Claude Opus acting worse over the last few days?

I’m not trying to hate on the model, but lately it feels like even simple problems are taking way too much back and forth. I’ll ask it to debug something, it misses the obvious issue, and then when I point directly to the code problem, it says something like, “You’re right, I should have been more careful.”

That is becoming really frustrating. The bigger issue for me is instruction following. I gave it a clear guideline document and specifically said, “Please read this and follow the steps exactly.” The document was written clearly in Markdown with the steps laid out.
But it still didn’t follow them. When I asked, “Did you actually read the doc? The answer is already there,” it basically apologized and said it should have read more carefully instead of assuming.

At that point, how are we supposed to trust the output?
These models are useful, but if they confidently skip instructions, ignore provided docs, or miss basic code issues, it becomes hard to rely on them for real work.
I also feel like Anthropic may be leaning so heavily into safety and security that the product experience is getting worse in some cases. Sometimes even basic security-related fixes get blocked or handled in an overly cautious way, even when the request is normal and legitimate.
For solopreneurs and small builders, this is a real pain. We use these tools to move faster, fix bugs, ship features, and improve security. But when the model doesn’t follow instructions or refuses reasonable requests, it slows everything down instead.

Curious if others are seeing the same thing with Opus recently, or if it’s just my experience.

Hi

So i have been using claude for months to organize a saga i am writting. I started on chatgpt but i got so pissed over time that i finally switched to claude and fuck did that felt good at the time.

I was using opus 4.6, and then switched to 4.8 when apparently it was good.

I dont use claude to write the saga for me. I use it like tony stark used jarvis. I feed it a ton of info, beats, arcs, dialogues, etc, and then i ask it to organize it, to tell me where in the narrative that beat or scene would best fit in, etc. And it was working great. It got to a point that i had over 20 files in the knowledge part of the project and since i am planning 3 books, i wanted to cut down to 4 files: 1 guide for each book and a glossary.

Fuck.my.life. i did notice weeks ago that answers were getting very, very slow, it was taking it a very long time. Then, it started the shit show. I VERY specifically tell it to cross check the old guide i already have and cross check the chats and files looking for info that would replace old stuff in the guides, so i can use it as an instrunctions manual when i start writting, where it shows the blocks, chapters, beats in each chapter, etc.

This last week i just couldnt anymore. Claude would recognize its mistakes, apparently correct itself, only for the next session, still in the same chat, repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

I only have the 3rd guide for the 3rd book to finish in order to start writting and after the daily fights with claude to do the things i ask it to do, that i know it can do, i just cant seem to bother anymore. Might as well use the old guide and try to remember if something changed because i cant trust opus 4.8 anymore and repeated mistakes.

Should i go back to 4.6? Wait for fable? Cancel my subs and wait it out? Dont wanna keep paying over 100€/month for an app that cant do what i tell it to do...

Help please. I am at a loss 🫠

I'm on the Pro subscription, and today I hit the usage limit after only 3–4 messages using Opus 4.8. Normally, I can use it for 2–3 hours before reaching the limit.

Is anyone else experiencing this today, or is it just me? I'm wondering if there's a temporary glitch or if something changed with the usage limits.

Edit: I found the issue. It appears to be related to the Claude Chrome extension. It's exhausting my usage credits within just 2 minutes even with sonnet or haiku of starting the session.

I feel like I'm better of almost writing the code myself these days. Why the performance of these models keeps degrading? Any ideas?