alt Hacker NewsDon't forget that Opus 5 was tracking fable on many benchmarks, yet it was borderline unusable for any coding work. My Claude sub usage has been 100% fable, 0% opus 5.
Benchmarks often don't survive contact with reality.
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Opus is fine at coding (for correctness), but horrible at talking about code. I don't really see the defect rate going down when using Astra or Fable 5.1, but they are just more coherent in both how they explaing code/architecture/choices, and how they actually code the thing. With Opus, I'm using smaller models to delete the vast majority of comments and 'clean up' correct code that is too weird.
Thing is, I'm still reading the majority of generated code, and I have colleagues who'll laugh at me if my PRs are a shit show. I fear what vibe coders are pushing to the servers of myriads of start ups, and pity the poor people who'll have to clean it up in a year or two.
Mines pretty much inverted - my colleagues and I noticed almost zero difference between the quality of code in Opus vs Fable. Occasionally I'll switch to Fable for an arduous debugging task but that's about it.
That's not my experience at all. Opus is an extremely capable coder on high or xhigh effort. It can read academic papers, implement algorithms from the description in the paper alone and reproduce results without breaking a sweat. This is remarkable because it is pure reasoning on unseen material; in some cases the paper was just published and there wasn't an implementation to learn from in the training data.