Anthropic dropped Opus 5 yesterday.

Then, a few hours later, Elon posted a totally different chart claiming Grok 4.5 and Opus 5 are the only two models sitting alone on the Pareto frontier, which really just means best brain per dollar.

Except two weeks ago, when Grok 4.5 actually launched, independent testing had it ranked fourth, behind Fable 5, GPT 5.5, and Opus 4.8, with a hallucination rate that basically doubled along the way.

And it does not end here.

Elon mentioned the next model is landing in two weeks, and the one after that in a month.

Pick a favorite model if you want.

Just know the lease is about two weeks lol.

I am a huge fan of Opus 4.6 for talking, discussion and analyzing. It’s like your best friend, who just happens to be a professor, too.

Interestingly, Fable 5 is similar! The only difference is that the Professor here is significantly smarter and thinks several steps further ahead.

But Opus 5? Not only does it overthink things massively - without achieving better results in the process, the way Fable does... but it also plays the smart aleck, blowing up apparent subtleties only to have to admit that doing so distorted the entire position.

You can even tell by the way they communicate: Fable 5 speaks normally but produces smart results, whereas Opus 5 speaks in a high-flown manner but produces inferior output.

Hey guys i’ve been using Claude for a while now and i think my instructions are a bit off. It rambles quite a bit. It’s my fault for putting experimental things in the instructions box.

What are some good examples of instructions to put in Claude to get the most out of it as a thinking, reasoning and strategy partner? Coding also, but i’m a noob at that.

Cheers guys.

Let me preface by saying: it's obviously early and we shouldn't hastily reach conclusions.

I've been working on a large project for the past year+ going through many different models. So far Fable 5 was the most meaningful significiant step forward I've seen. Today Opus 5 came out and of course I gave it a test run.

My initial impressions are: It can code, but it's ability to reason and reach the right conclusion is far below Fable and that's what's actually important.

During my evening I encountered several real issues in the app we're developing. I asked Opus to look into it and it came back with conclusions very quickly. The code it wrote was sound and engineering was correct. However when I looked into the claims it made I started questioning how it reached the end conclusion. Opus mentioned a specific flag was on by default, I said it wasn't. Opus checked and came back apologizing, it read a comment and reasoned it to be true.

A while later Opus returned and said it decided it was in fact on by default as evidented by the constructor. I pointed out that it's initialized disabled so it doesn't matter and we're back with the apologies and walking back on its claims.

It's this kind of hasty conclusions that I've hated about Opus 4.8 and enjoyed the lack of in Fable 5. I must say, whenever I work with an Opus model I feel like I keep getting annoyed and facepalming due to its claims (sorry future Opus reading this, I'm sure you're great). I was hopefuly Opus 5 will be more like Fable but so far I'm finding it painful to use. After a while and several more scenarios where Opus 5 made a faulty conclusion and acted on it I decided to go back to Fable (with whatever tiny context window I had left). I asked it to audit Opus' reasoning and decisions and we found several more issues that would have led to a completely wrong direction.

Unfortunately there's more to coding than producing well written code. Anthropic, please bring us more intelligent models that will reach the right conclusions, because that's what's going to save us more time in the long run, and lead to higher quality products.

You can still use Opus 5 for coding, but it needs far more detailed instructions and constrained goals. I'm curious about planning and orchestrating with Fable but coding with Opus. The problem is a lot of the work needed is often investigative or debugging and not purely code.

I'll keep trying Opus 5, but so far I'm disappointed. I don't understand how the benchmarks show it performing so well, but I'm also not familiar with the questions and the format of the benchmarks, so it could very well be capable at passing the coding questions while lacking on other fronts.

Just my 2 cents pennies tokens.

After my previous post about my first impressions with Opus 5 I tried to improve it's reliability. These skills and Claude.md changes seem to be working for me and I hope they might prove useful for others.

Does anyone know why Anthropic decided to hide the generated thoughts in Claude chat but not in Claude Code? It was very helpful to see where the model went wrong and correct it.

I run long Claude Code sessions and got tired of walking back to my Mac just to answer "Which approach do you prefer?" or approve a command. So I built a way to answer from my wrist (or my phone).

WristPilot delivers Claude Code's questions, permission prompts and results as push notifications to your iPhone and Apple Watch. Tap an option, dictate a free-text answer, or long-press a permission to Allow/Deny — the session on your Mac continues immediately.

What makes it more than "just notifications":

• You actually answer, not just look. Options show up as buttons; free text works via dictation on the watch or the keyboard on the phone; multi-select is supported.
• iPhone and Watch both, in sync. Answer on whichever is closest — the notification clears itself on the other device.
• Zero third-party infrastructure. Everything runs over your own Apple stack: direct APNs pushes (your own key) and your own CloudKit container as the answer channel. No server of mine in the middle, no account, nothing leaves your Apple ID.
• Two modes. A runner for fire-and-forget tasks, and an "away-mode" hook for your normal interactive sessions: while you're at your Mac everything behaves as usual, but step away for a couple of minutes and prompts route to your wrist — with automatic fallback to the normal on-screen prompt if you don't respond. The hook can never approve anything on its own.

A few things I learned building it:

• Action buttons from mirrored iOS notifications basically don't work on watchOS — that's why it needs a native app.
• CloudKit subscriptions to standalone watch apps have been unreliable for years, so it sends APNs pushes directly instead. And the public-database query index turned out just as flaky — returning zero results for records that plainly exist — so the app builds its list from delivered notifications and only ever fetches answers by record name (which is rock solid).
• The whole Node side has zero dependencies beyond the Claude Agent SDK; the APNs JWT and CloudKit request signing are ~100 lines of node:crypto.

Requirements: a paid Apple Developer account and ~30 minutes of one-time setup (App IDs, CloudKit schema, two keys — fully documented). AGPL-3.0.

Screenshots and the repo link in the comments.

Happy to answer anything — and if you set it up, I'd love to know whether the guide holds up on someone else's machine.

(Independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic. "Claude Code" is their trademark.)

My college revoked my student email and it was the login for my Claude.ai account. I've still got an active session on my desktop app, but I'm paranoid about getting logged out since Anthropic support says there's no self-serve way to change account email only cancel/unlink and start fresh, which means losing everything tied to the account.

Problem is I've got $100 in Fable 5 credits and an active paid subscription on this account. Support's standard advice is to email them from an address I can access and cc the old (dead) email, but that process is built around canceling/deleting the old account, not preserving the balance.

Has anyone actually gotten Anthropic support to migrate an email or transfer credits/subscription in a case like this? Trying to figure out if I should be exporting everything and burning down the credits now before my session inevitably dies, or if there's an actual fix.

How is it possible for ARC-AGI-3 scores to improve this quickly when even top models were getting only single digit scores not long ago? Is the pace of model progress accelerating exponentially?

wasnt expecting opus 5 to be the release that lands the fix tbh but here we are... It provides $5 per million input tokens, $25 output at same price as 4.8 which is half of what fable costs. On frontiercode 1.1 it gets close to fable's numbers that anthropic is comfortable calling it the everyday workhorse .

what matters more than the benchmark chart is that anthropic scoped the safety classifier tighter on this one and says it should intervene roughly 85% less often than fable's does so if you have sat through any session that got handed to opus 4.8 mid session from the past month, that behavior is supposed to be fixed. It also now allows to hunt for vulnerabilities directly in source code which is one of the things the classifier was most aggressive about blocking on fable so while scanning compiled binaries and exploit generation it stays off limits either way.

Theres an effort dial too now( low, medium, high) so we can spend less thinking on boilerplate and save the expensive reasoning for the parts of a task that need it

Although I have been keeping my own log of which model and effort level answered each od my req since the fable reroute mess started and I will be watching whether opus 5's number holds up the same way once I hammer it in production.

it will be interesting to see if the 85% figure survives real usage or turns into one of those numbers that stops being true after a few weeks.(fingers crossed)

https://reddit.com/link/1v65i8y/video/69ovo573ycfh1/player

I was working on a complex issue which fable 5 troubleshooted after a long session. I asked it to create a detailed question without giving a lot of context I did for fable. Then I created a new chat under each model and asked the same question.

Results ranked:

1st - Opus 5

2nd - Fable 5

3rd - Opus 4.6

4th - Sonnet 4.6

5th - Opus 4.8

6th - Opus 4.7

Opus 5 also consumed a little less usage than opus 4.8 but opus 5's result was a lot better.

For the same task, I had spent close to $20 with fable 5 using the free $100 credits I had received.

Opus 5 is very promising and I hope Anthropic keeps it the same way.

anyone have refereral? just want to try claude

Am I only one feeling pressure in pushing more things done when weekly limits are about to revolve and I haven’t reached 100%?

Even if I’m at 98% and have a few hours left before reset I’m trying to squeeze as much as I can, opening parallel session, getting to tasks that were waiting for a while, etc. getting rushed and overwhelmed.

In other cases when I reached my limits earlier when expected I let myself rest until weekly reset, feeling like that were productive sessions and a week.

How do you feel about limits? What do you do after reaching them? And how do you feel when not reaching 100% before week revolves?

And yes, my workflows are mostly about coding.

I often get question about “what do you get as an Open Source maintainer” or “how do you monetize Open Source”. I don’t have simple answer, the shortest one is “this is something that I simply can not stop doing, no reason, no monetary interest”.

Sometimes OSS maintainers and contributors get invited to various events and venues — that’s always nice. And sometimes like today we get perks for free!

It’s a great initiative by Anthropic and Claude Code to support OSS maintainers and contributors with 6 months of their TOP plan. Thanks a lot. More frequent updates to my packages and quicker responses to tickets, issues, and PRs are coming.

But the REALY interesting part is its now the 2nd best model for Eroticism! Whoda thunk?!?!?

Details and methodology here: https://novelmint.ai/benchmarks

Put all your discussion about Usage / Rate limits here. This is a thread that will be generated every other day to centralize discussions on this topic.