I gave fable 5 a task for which opus has been really really underperforming. Fable 5 took far less time and produced actually useful analysis. Instead of just regurgitating roughly what the code already does or misunderstanding entirely, it identified multiple routes to improve. Now, the code it is analyzing is not very good as it was mostly produced by opus.

Opus had consistently ignored my instructions and looped on broken logic over the last several weeks.

I’ll be sad when this model is removed from Claude code because I won’t be paying api pricing to work on open source projects.