alt Hacker NewsAround February, Opus 4.6 was excellent. Smart, fast, proactive. Then it got lobotomized and it's never been the same after that nerf. 4.7 came along and it too was disappointing—not unlike 4.8, which despite feeling a smidge smarter, tends to write word salad and is basically unusable for some workflows.
Fable felt like having access to that "old Opus" again, but a little smarter. Sort of like I'd expect an Opus 5 to be. It's not earth shattering, but it was a step in the right direction. And it was distinctively so, because having to go back to Opus 4.6/4.7/4.8 has been borderline depressing...
It understood more with less help, did more per turn, and was less argumentative. It also felt a little less trite in its answers, which is an understated improvement for those who use claude code all the time
Replies
I miss the old Opus 4.6 too. They're probably quantizing the old models.
All of these discussions of models being "nerfed" reminds me of discussions among audiophiles "this cable sounds so much better than this other one, it's night and day, ferrari versus honda civic"
Yet when you do blind tests they can't tell the difference between a $1000 cable and a $1 one.
I bet if you do blind tests between GPT-5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 most would struggle to tell them apart, yet they are certain that "5.5 was nerfed 1 week after release, it's so obvious, it was John Carmack, now it can barely write a for loop"
This is exactly what I find frustrating. I get comfortable with the latest model X. Then a new sparkly model Y launches. I am like, I don't need your new fangled Y, that consumes more tokens. My needs are small and i am happy with the older X.
But then X starts to degrade. At first subtly, and then drastically. So then I am forced to upgrade to Y.
What I do not understand is:
> is this a sneaky way for companies to push users up the chain?
> Or is this a genuine fault in model design/resource allocation?