Comment by netsec_burn
13 hours ago
After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally.
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.
I used Sol to extract the remaining decryption keys from the Super Mario Maker 2 (Switch) game files. Someone had previously extracted all the keys from the original release, but not any of the new ones from updates. Not only did it succeed, but it helped me understand the data sufficiently to add support for “Super World” rendering to my level viewer (which I made back in 2021), eg the little widget at the top of https://www.smm2-viewer.com/players/B16-306-GVG
I was very pleasantly surprised to find Sol wasn’t obstructive over what was clearly a very grey area endeavour.
Interesting. I've been wishing that old 'Stars!' game from the 90s would play easily on modern systems. I'd love it if we'd got to the point where I could point Codex at a folder with an ISO from my CD of the game and tell it to go reverse engineer it all for understanding of game mechanics, then go recreate it in a modern language capable of running cross-platform. Scarcely any need to improve on graphics, it could even be a PWA.
There's people that have tried to contact Jeff McBride and follow the IP trail but the IP is currently owned by a company that went defunct. Not sold, but no one is even bothering to register its LLC any more, it's simply dead.
I was having it look at creating a driver for some old scanner and it actively looked up exactly where that gray area for my country was wrt decompilation.
Fable is almost unusable for anything but super boring mainstream stuff. I was getting safeguard flagged so often I’ve significantly reduced my usage out of fear they will blacklist/ban me.
Some of the topics it’s flagged have been hard for me to understand what it seeing that can be remotely concerning in my requests.
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Have they made Sol do less unwanted autonomy than the previous Codex models did?
I feel like those examples are considered difficult because they're niche topics, but aren't actually all that difficult in a general sense. What I consider truly difficult are things like taking a ticket and implementing it in a preexisting codebase, using a clean and reasonable design that fits the existing style and makes sense to a human, and avoids the footguns I learned by working with the codebase for over a day.
If you said this in 2025 I would've 100% understood, but to be honest getting AI models to do a pretty good job on day-to-day ticket work has become so boring that we don't even bother using the top tier models and higher effort slots for that anymore. I personally wind up tweaking the results a lot and recursively having fresh agents review the diff, but that's just because I'm picky; in a lot of cases the first diff is actually pretty damn decent.
Compared to what I am doing at home experimentally, I feel like day-to-day work is absolutely nothing. Not only am I also working with existing codebases in my experimental prototyping, but I am also doing things vastly more complex with vastly harder constraints.
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This is true in some sense.
Getting the AI to output code that you like is difficult.
As an example, let's say in React you have a "useLocale()" hook.
The AI will happily pass down locale as a prop to 5 child components instead of just calling the hook in the component.
A review from another model did not flag such stylistic issues either.
I believe that the latest models are very good at functionally achieving the goal, but still have poor taste for UX or code quality.
The most productive use of AI for software development happens in an environment where you do not review the code but test the UX end to end.
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FYI I run it consistently in xhigh regardless of difficulty of the task at hand. I remember high being very fast, but I'd rather wait a bit more and get better output. AIs are insanely fast compared to me anyway, even on xhigh. Consumes more usage, but even at 100 EUR/m I don't hit limits.
After hitting the session limit on my company's plan so many times with Claude when I was using it, I mostly keep Codex on "high" rather than "xhigh" as a way to leave the tokens for my more ambitious coworkers. It's possible that having it higher might end up with better output, but so far at least I've yet to see a way to get any model to do 100% of what I need up front without any need for me to make changes that end up being more tedious to do via interaction than by hand, and it doesn't feel worth spending a bunch more tokens trying to figure out how to better communicate to it up front how the dominoes get set up so they fall in place properly the next time.
To be fair, I actually do run xhigh as my default. However, for the first time in my experience of trying and using LLMs, with Sol.. sometimes I feel confident enough to set the effort level to "Low". I just had Sol prototype some AWS stuff on low earlier. Great result, did exactly what I wanted.
How do you handle context limits? With more thinking tokens you fill it up earlier. Compaction degrades performance too. What's your strategy?
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And Mai-Code-1.1-Flash seems like a really good cooperative player to GPT 5.6 Sol. You get Sol to help you make a detailed plan, and Mai codes it up and you can get pretty decent code out the other end without too many tokens if you are careful.
Why wouldn’t you use Luna for that? It’s super cheap.
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How detailed of a plan? Are you including code snippets or just behavior and letting the lesser model decide how to implement?
AI-pilled obsession with "taste" is bordering on insanity
It's just vibes
It's easy to dismiss "taste" when you either have none or just fail to appreciate it, but nothing gives you an appreciation for the importance of taste like LLMs. There is no benchmark for taste, so while many things improve taste does not. Bad taste is, in fact, a huge component of what makes AI slop so sloppy.
But human coders can have bad taste too. There is code where there is nothing obviously objectively wrong, yet the choices feel like they were made by someone who just doesn't value or put emphasis on the right things, yet spends a lot of effort on trivialities. It comes in many forms.
That's what they're always going to be, so not sure what would be "insane" about it. They literally feed on and emit natural language, and are put to work on informally defined, arbitrary tasks.
When people figure out any reliable strategies to test and benchmark them, that's insane, and in the positive sense. This very same issue has been a thing for humans as well forever, and remains only very questionably solved (IQ, academic tests). This is not easy.
It's vibes all the way down.
It's... really just vibes?
Always has been.
things that are alchemical are rarely alchemy. That is to say things are very fiddly but stick a room of monkeys on typewriters, a schizophrenic developer with HolyC and adderall or an LLM, persistence is the key to many of these things like drivers, extracting keys from vintage security domains, etc. Dropping into xdd to a human is a chore, not for an LLM.
Although I am not exactly sure what you mean, I am not really claiming it is doing anything I couldn't do - but yes, it does so with much less effort. For example, I can have it set up probes and tracing on Linux that I personally would have to consult documentation to do. It might not even have to consult the documentation due to having the information on-tap, but even if it does, it's nothing that would cause it any fatigue, it's just going to keep moving forward in a loop until it is satisfied that it meets the criteria. I could've done all of this alone - I really could have. I just would not have. Being able to do something 10 times faster or with 10 times less effort is, in some senses, sometimes more impactful than being able to do entirely new things you couldn't do before.
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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.
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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!
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*Claude Code usage is reducing by 33% in 2 days, Wednesday August 19... cmon anthropic: clau.de/cc-50-promo
Yeah, I very much agree on this. I think Sol and Fable code quality is on par. Maybe Fable is just a tiny bit better, but Sol compensates with its ability to work through things, while Fable, in my experience, generally tends to avoid solving problems that require many LOC.
However, I think these are very different models in terms of orchestration. Long-horizon tasks are way more predictable with Fable. It just doesn't lose track of details. Thus I ended up building a small wrapper around Pi (where I run Sol) so that CC can delegate via background tasks, automatically wait for completion, and do what was one of the most effective parts - steer Sol toward simplicity, getting Sol out of code-review infinite loops (Pi calls for Codex review to ship better, but generally gets stuck on P2 and results in vastly overengineered work).
One of the worst experiments was enforcing coverage at 100%. Only Sol, with an enormous amount of code and significant pushback (on architecture decisions) to Fable, was able to reach it. It made me think this is somehow related to overengineering in general, so that instructions on acceptance criteria in claude.md plus proper DX (e.g., Lefthook) actually led to okay results. It mostly helped that responsibilities were clearly split: Fable designs architecture, Sol handles coding and debugging.
Sol w/ Effort -> Low
It's great, don't get me wrong, but so is Fable. I'm just comparing the long-horizon task performance between the two at the same or similar effort levels.
Given the 50% discount on Sol and how smart it is, yeah it's unprecedented value. If you only want to use low effort, there's a clear winner here on value and it's not even close!
Interesting the use of Max and Ultra. I don’t doubt the complexity, but would someone use Max or Ultra on Typescript or Go, for example?
Is it more about just avoiding any mistakes? Seems like that would be costly when medium or high would work fine?
*The "Max" I referred to was the plan tier, not the effort level btw
For small tasks, you can just use something like low or medium effort and it can usually avoid mistakes; after all, the model will test the code anyways and can do some baseline level of iterating.
In regards to cost, we need to acknowledge how generous OpenAI was in the last couple months with Codex usage credits (no weekly limits) and usage resets. It afforded me many a dive with Codex! Yes it uses more tokens, but sometimes it's worth it -- just depends on what you're working on.
Finally, Ultra(code) isn't that bad when it comes to cached tokens. I think folks overstate the general token usage of ultra effort on both providers.
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Both models are great at green-fielding a project when given detailed specs.
Both models overthink too liberally (imo) during these larger multi-shots. Sol overthinks more than Fable.
Both models are really smart and perform great for general knowledge and regular coding tasks.
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.
Remember, Dario knows best
I’ve never had it refuse anything. Even vulnerability searching in my codebase.
Yeah I feel like I'm living in a different dimension than these people. I wonder what they're working on. I've literally never had it refuse everything and I max out my 20x plan every week
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Fable is the only one that follows my instructions correctly, which I find quite important. It takes STYLE.md and SPEC.md as law, and code just like I would code, with the same mistakes and all.
I just can't get Opus (Opus 5 is dumb as a rock, to be fair) or Sol to do that, so I exclusively use Fable for personal work. When I reach my weekly limit, usually on the last day close to the reset, I just go back to coding by hand ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Heck, it even does security reviews and fixes, as long as I don't ask it to "attack" the codebase. I'm planning on using Kimi or GLM for that part.
5.6 Sol is a joy to use for "daily chat" as well. Compared to earlier OpenAI models it catches and corrects its mistakes very reliably. It also seems way smarter in tuning its replies to areas I am more/less knowledgeable about (i.e. when I ask it a law question, it assumes I know as much as a toddler which is true, but on political topics it more easily throws around terminology) and including analogies. On medium thinking, it's a very good compromise between speed and quality.
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 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.
And you arent writing English
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the GPT models are much stricter in adhering to my AGENTS.md guidelines and heuristics than Claude.
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.
I switched from claude to gpt when 5.6 came out for the same reasons. I don't understand why so many people are still using claude when GPT and open source are so much better.
I also cancelled Claude recently. GPT 5.6 models are really good, and they have much better usage limits.
I cancelled my subscription recently and moved to Sol. So far - it has been a great experience. The only aspect where Fable/Claude is better I feel is doing some research from the web and summarising the facts.
I generally prefer Fable but in my experience Sol is a much better web researcher
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.
indeed, I'm switching from claude to codex
It's the complete opposite for me. The model might be the worst model I have ever used when compared to other models in the class. You just can't get it not to just write the most enterprise over complex over engineered solutions for every little thing you ask it to do.
It the first model to actually make me pissed off to use AI. I absolutely hate the model so much.
I don't even want to see the codebases this model is fucking up.
It might just be good at finding bugs that about it. That all I would ever use it for just because it works harder than Claude models.
Really?
I have witnessed 5.6 Sol Ultra edit line after line of literally empty lines ... for hours.
I wasn't literally watching it, I came back to a goal (that it started for itself without my approval!) that had done nothing but that for some reason.
It couldn't explain why it had started.
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.
> if you ask something too obvious or direct it will stop you other than that, it work flawlessly
What on earth are you asking it?
You've replied incredulously to a similar stated experience in this thread already and proceeded to ignore the follow-up. Why are you again asking a question to which you have no intention to field an answer?
output token efficiency bruv. u never go wrong with it
The final straw for Claude was its refusal to give me a list of the most recent rapes reported by the BBC and basic information about them (location, date, names, just things reported in mainstream media). It outright REFUSED to complete this task.
I will not be told what I can and can't do by AI and I will no longer be supporting American companies run by despicable people. GPT only gets my money right now because its so fast and cheap but I'll be back to Chinese models in no time.
you should check out the codex desktop app. people who've been using claude code for a long time will surely be surprised.
Used claude since 7/2025. Switched to codex after fable got blocked. It was still 5.5 but I knew they had to come up with something. As soon as I switched, wow. It wasn't super intelligent, but it was stable. Every day it was the same performance. This consistency is definitely worth paying for.
sol is much better imho than Fable but i can understand if they will perform wildly different for different people with different levels of expertise aswell as different needs. I dislike fable myself it doesnt really work for me.
Sol also doesnt _really_ work but it sort of tricks me into thinking it does more convincingly :p.
cancelled my subscriptions few days ago. (was on 100$ ones, not sure if there is diff in quality for higher tiers or not.. there might be that too).
what i hate the most is that they will make any obvious mistake you do not tell them to avoid. then on the next plan to fix it, your token limit is hit at step 4/5 -_-. Both models seem incredibly good at that mostly...
for tasks outside of coding and program design i do find them quite useful. like devops crap. maybe because i hate that, i like their help there more.
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.
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)
That was an issue at least a year ago. I had signed up for a claude account on my iPhone and then wanted to sign in on my laptop but nope, not possible. Insane they still haven't fixed it.
Can somebody at Anthropic tag claude in slack or whatever goofy shit you do and ask it to add Apple OAuth to your website? Clearly humans aren't testing it.
I signed up on iOS, Sign In with Apple, cause I don't go around giving random companies my actual email if I can help it
and sure enough, I was right to do so: They don't even let you remove your payment method afterwards. Every other store, Steam etc., lets you.
No way I have enough trust to install their desktop app after that, so I just want to try it through their website..
Can Sign In with Google, but not with Apple
so you gotta open the Passwords app, copy your random email, paste into the website, then copy the OTP from your email..
It's been that way for at least a year
The desktop app was clunky too the last couple times I tried it a few months ago
and the AI itself hasn't been that hot compared to ChatGPT/Codex either: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png
So all the Claude hype posted on HN seems like a case of the emperor with no clothes to me
(P.S. The thing I just now tried to do on Claude hit the weekly usage limit after 2 minutes)
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