I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any model to do, and it does great. For the more advanced stuff, it definitely needs the effort bumped. But even with the effort bumped, the token usage really doesn't seem to skyrocket too badly until at least you hit xhigh and max, which really only seem to be necessary if you are doing genuine crazy stuff, so it's not that bad. I did similar stuff with Fable. In fact, I went directly from an Anthropic subscription with Fable to an OpenAI subscription with Sol, more or less, and it really felt pretty seamless. If anything, I was thrilled to realize how much I actually preferred Codex CLI, to the point where I started using it at work too.

Fable seems to be generally more impressive at outputting one-shot web apps. I'm not really saying that to try to downplay what Fable can do, it's just that if I compare the two, this is one of the few definitely noticeable areas that you can easily demonstrate. Obviously, one-shotting programs is much better as a demonstration of a model's capabilities than it is practically useful (not that it is useless, but hopefully my point is understood).

However, whatever Fable truly is better at, one thing I really like about GPT 5.6 Sol is even harder to quantify: taste. GPT 5.6 Sol outputs are still LLM outputs and they contain many things that people would probably consider "Claude-isms" for better or worse, but overall I really prefer the GPT 5.6 Sol output. I find it to be generally more tasteful. Hard to quantify, but when talking to people I've had enough people seemingly agree with me to convince me that it really is true.

Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less.

After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues.

Fable (imo) had the edge on the $200 plan, but after this 50% reduction I'd say Codex is better value by far and there's no contest.

---

Using Fable as the orchestrator and delegating tasks to Sol 5.6 Ultra via the codex plugin in Claude Code yielded good results, but still there was a lot more over-engineering (thus time and tokens spent) than Fable by itself would've done.

Both models suffer from doing-too-much. But both models are fundamentally really smart and knowledgeable. I think it's really close and pricing cuts really spice things up for us consumers! Sol is a clear winner in the value department and the $100 plan is enticing!

---

*Claude Code usage is reducing by 33% in 2 days, Wednesday August 19... cmon anthropic: clau.de/cc-50-promo

I too switched to OpenAI after I got sick of Anthropic's constant "safety" downgrades. Sol is definitely a breath of fresh air.

> even after completing the verification program

Was it easy to complete it?

I ended up in some weird state where I can't even attempt the verification at all. Opened the Persona tab once, closed it and then it never opened ever again. It says a verification precheck failed.

Even without TAC, Sol doesn't seem to get blocked very often. Fable would downgrade to Opus if I looked at it wrong.

Fable feels less cumbersome to work with, but it is SO DAMN ANNOYING with the refusals that I'm leaning more and more on Sol, and very much looking forward to GPT6. Just seems like Anthropic is trying their hardest to ruin their reputation and user experience.

you should check out the codex desktop app. people who've been using claude code for a long time will surely be surprised.

Sol is my daily driver but there are still times I reach for Fable when Sol doesn’t cut it. Just yesterday for example, I was trying to build a self-modifying hot-reloaded agent harness in Elixir for fun and Sol just kept doing silly things like thin wrappers and unnecessary abstractions. Fable handled the task elegantly. Sol is really good as a reviewer for finding bugs due to its thoroughness however.

Fable is still the best there is. Sol close second but I find it gets way to stuck on details.

Also Opus 5 is fine if your codebase is simple.

I'm also in Anthropic Cyber Verification Program, but they specifically exclude Fable, just goes up to Opus 5.

I hear you on the downgrades, I'm 13/13 on downgrades, and last downgraded me to Sonnet for asking for reasoning chain.

Claude as a harness at all really spends too much time before giving user feedback

Its a crutch that is no longer competitive

I have a "strategy / life-coach" project, and was surprised at how much better Sol is than Fable on it, as I've found Fable to have the edge for most things for me so far. But Sol: questions were better, insight was better, it got the brief better.

Yeah at this point claude is overrated, overly expensive, weird writing style (elliptical), and the worst part is the aggressive guardrails that even normal convos get interrupted, meanwhile openAI is still I would say at the normal balance, if you ask something too obvious or direct it will stop you other than that, it work flawlessly, plus, I have yet to hit the limit despite heavily using it these past weeks.

Sol has held stuff for a while to do the same sort of hazard checks I assume Fable is doing, but it always releases them. I think that's the better way to handle it rather than preventing me from seeing how far I can get generating schematics to use in Minecraft. Currently: a mostly normal voxel house.

I recently tried Claude again after several months, to see if it was any better at something Codex has been struggling with…

They STILL don't have an option to "Sign in with Apple" on the website, but they do for Google??!? (and on iPhone of course)

Screw that asinine UX

(and no it wasn't better than Codex at this particular task)