Comment by rb2e
4 days ago
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5 - A blog post for those not wanting to go through a 190ish page pdf
4 days ago
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5 - A blog post for those not wanting to go through a 190ish page pdf
I like how they highlighted Opus 5 as the best for “Agentic Coding” even though the number is slightly lower than Fable. Close enough for marketing, I guess!
At half the price and less likely to auto-downgrade, it sounds like a reasonable claim.
> At half the price and less likely to auto-downgrade, it sounds like a reasonable claim
Two benchmarks (artificial analysis and vals) show a increase in cost (a insane increase for vals compared to Opus 4.8).
Already posted this before, so here is the link.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041158
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given that i couldn't even use fable without it downgrading to Opus, this is just a straight upgrade for me
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Best can describe multiple things.
Almost as good for half the cost is something I'm very comfortable describing that way.
> Almost as good for half the cost is something I'm very comfortable describing that way.
It's also not unusual in this context - many people describe the Chinese models as "best", because it's 80% as good for 20% of the price (or similar).
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Best marketing
The blog posts figure cites Frontier-Bench for its agentic coding score, and shows Opus 5 beating Fable 5 43.3% to 33.7%.
Recent releases have said something to the effect (paraphrasing here):
"Use <less expensive or older model> for everyday tasks and <other non-critical stuff>. Use <more expensive or recent model> for complex coding tasks, refactoring large code bases, etc.".
Then, the next model/release emerges and the previous "best for complex" gets demoted to "everyday".
Obviously, it's all relative. But, it does beg the question: was the previous model really good for complex coding tasks or no? I mean, how is it now suddenly only good for the "easy" stuff?
> I mean, how is it now suddenly only good for the "easy" stuff?
Because your expectations have changed.
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I think you're being overly cynical here. First, I don't see any claim that is the world's best model for agentic coding. Second, it is absolutely the best model in terms of coding performance vs. dollar, and it's raw performance seems very close to the frontier.
GPT 5.6 is far more token efficient at most tasks with similar performance. Especially so for Opus 4.8, still to be seen with Opus 5.
Where are you getting cheaper per dollar?
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It would still be the best model per dollar if the score was 2% lower instead of 0.1% lower. Would it be ok to still give it the highlight color then?
How big of a lie is too big? Especially when no lie needed to be told at all: many including myself would have noticed the tiny 0.1% deficit and been suitably impressed by the Opus 5 result.
I’ll admit this is a small deception by today’s standards. I’m one of those who believes in truth for truth’s sake.
Edit: typo
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Which numbers are you seeing? It does show that it's better than Fable 5 in most things related to coding?
Using the most expensive model for all of your agentic coding work hasn’t been good practice for a long time. Not unless you have infinite money to spend.
Fable is typically used for key planning, architecting, and review tasks.
I think this is a case where you don’t understand the use case, not that the marketing department is making mistakes.
They cost the same if you're already at $200/mo
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Eh, not really. Fable does a lot better on coding than Opus 4.8.
Just this past week Fable was able to figure out a couple of small issues for me where Opus was failing to.
Also both are still somewhat bad at UI implementation. Opus more so
In my opinion, the frontier is passed what is really needed for coding. Fable is good as a supervisor.
Also it scored worse on DeepSWE than chatgpt 5.6 sol
Yeah I spotted this immediately too. I'm sorry. You're supposed to be a multi billion dollar company and you can't even highlight your chart honestly?
And no data retention for 30 days.
I mean that certainly makes it best-in-class
Thanks for that, looks really good. I can see why they were constantly pushing back fable going out of the max sub with these benchmarks
I wonder why FrontierCodev1.1's data lists Opus 5 as better than Fable 5.
this feels like the perfect example of an LLM producing a long text document. And end users just using an LLM to summarize it without actually reading it