Comment by jpgvm
5 hours ago
I vastly prefer Sol. It does what I tell it to almost exactly, pretty much every time.
I work on very low level stuff (think RTL/FPGA, firmware, software where optimising for nanoseconds is just normal).
For me Sol is the only cost effective model available. Fable 5.1 is indeed good and vastly better than original Fable (which refused to work on most of my stuff for 'safety' reasons).
It's very good at this sort of low level stuff to the point that I really can't understand/relate to people having a good time with Opus (which comparatively performs extremely poorly on my particular workload).
I also just don't like how lazy Anthropic models are. They will do 10% of what is asked and then summarily declare victory.
Sol on the other hand is more like "one of us", slight touch of the 'tism, extremely pedantic, will go to the edge of the known universe if that is what it takes to prove/fix/build what you asked for or run out out of credits trying.
It's a personal and workload dependent thing. For me right now Sol for 99% of stuff because Fable 5.1 still burns through $5k in credits a day.
Can confirm this as well, mostly VHDL and HLS. Sol and Fable can reason about performance and designs consistently. Whereas Opus and others seem to just throw generic optimisation techniques at the wall unprovoked (while hallucinating a justification + expected improvement) until the synth reports improve.
Agree 100%. And I also work a lot on lower level / systems stuff (including RTL here and there, too). Opus is sloppy, and leaves negative cases all over. The GPT models in Codex have a more pedantic and detail oriented "personality." Often to a fault.
Sol will leave a mess of excessive redundant tests and isn't so great at abstraction ; but it produces more reliable working systems.
It's kind of nice to have access to both, but I don't have the $$ for that right now, so I just keep the Codex sub