Comment by igravious
13 hours ago
After having got a taste of Fable 5 for me Opus 4.8 doesn't cut it any more -- and I don't know how to put this, I don't know if it's just me, but it's rhetorical flourishes are starting to really grate on me, never mind that it is at times deliberately weasel-wordy and economical with the truth until pressed. Opus 4.8 is definitely a stronger coding agent than DeepSeek 4.0 or Kimi 2.7 succeeding where they flounder and fail but its way of expressing itself conversationally is making me reconsider my subscription …
You are not alone. How about GPT 5.5? Does it come close to Fable 5?
GPT 5.5 xhigh is smarter than Fable but Fable like Opus 4.8 as well is faster and seems more “agentic”. It’s easy to test this. Build a fairly complex software with Claude(opus or Fable).
Review the commits with both Claude and GPT 5.5 Xhigh. You can see that Fable is still sloppy(er) compared to GPT. You can test it the other way around as well(drive the dev with GPT and review with GPT and Claude). You get the same result Claude has an edge though and that’s on building more beautiful user interfaces.
I somehow take the opposite on almost everything here.
4.8 xhigh or max has a slight edge on 5.5 xhigh, for very complex logic perhaps it loses but it's just better in almost every other way, especially code quality. GPT is a slop machine outputs way too much and over-abstracts, plus its communication is so bad in comparison.
Fable was for sure a step above GPT, I tried them both against a few of the same hard tasks and it was not a small difference.
5.5 is pretty good. It's no Fable though. It is definitely better than opus tho.