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Comment by jpablo | Hacker News Reader

Which newer Claude model doesn’t do that? Fable 5.1 still writes like that for me. I have to fight against it to write proper software labels, or (the horror!) rewrite things manually.

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IMO Opus 5.5 has surpassed Fable 5.1 in terms of both writing style and actual capability. Like I would give the same task to both models and Opus 5.5 consistently produces better results and explains itself better than Fable 5.1.

That's what I'm finding too. Opus 5.5 feels both consistently better than Fable and faster.

Fable is inappropriate for the vast majority of tasks (yes, including yours!), and it is quite obnoxious. Opus 5.5 writes concisely and almost sounds like a human.

IMO the default style of Opus 5.5 is still terrible but it is way better than 5.0. If you tell its styling is horrendous it usually rewrites in an actually quite good form.

i tend to run a pass of sol 6.1 at its output, cleans up the language well and finds defects opus missed

This. You can prompt Opus 5.5 into writing well.

I recommend comparing what it rewrites to something that Gemini models output. I think there's still a lot that Anthropic could improve.

Ok I bite, for what concrete tasks do you get better results with Opus than with Fable?

Because if true, I see no reason to spend that extra money, but for me Fable clearly outperformed Opus on complex tasks. (Including giving the same task and compare results)

I let Claude do my job pretty much (with company approval) managing the entire stack of an app.

8hs of “prompt engineering” daily for a year or so.

I find Fable immensely better than 5.5 in their capabilities and results. Opus makes mistakes, a lot and big. Both on High Effort.

I just run Fable for literally everything including daily random use. Never run out of tokens on the 100 plan.

Opus 5.5 is the only one that doesn't do ths, _as much_, it would still to the "it's ___ until it isn't" all day though. Can't wait for that to go away too.

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