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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

I spent $800 in a few hours when my sub maxed out because I was trying to get something done and had a long car ride to let it churn.

Their api pricing is absurdly expensive.

A billion a day? How many agents are you running?

I have mine churning like butter and I'm rarely hitting a billion tokens per day, what's your workflow look like?

I’m exclusively using ultra and I run out in 3-4 days consistently. Those resets are great but I’ve noticed they like to cluster them at the start of the cycle, would be better if they spaced them out more.

I can’t sign up for that. I tried authorizing Codex a couple days ago. For some reason, their system says my phone number has been used for verification 3 times even though it definitely has not. I’ve had this phone number for over 20 years. OpenAI support is useless. They just keep repeating the policy without actually helping me.

Why would the potential acquisition have anything to do with this? They do discounts all the time on various models. Luna was 50% off last week..

Not sure as OpenAI models (Sol, Luna,..) are also discounted on the Vercel AI Gateway rn. My bet is on OpenAI trying to drive more enterprise customers to their models through API.

It's really only between Anthropic and OpenAI for many of my use cases, since I have a Zero Data Retention agreement with both. I'm not trusting random inference providers and especially not Elmo with sensitive data.

Since when does Grok 4.6 have Sol 5.6's intelligence? I don't believe it.

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I would in such a scenario expect the GPUs to be dumped to industrial breakers who would send them to China for refurbishment and repackaging before being sold again on Amazon, AliExpress, and Taobao as last gen gaming cards from weird brands and specs.

This is what happened after the great crypto GPU dumping.

The thinking traces are server-side, not exposed

They can’t decrypt the thinking traces.

I'm not having that experience. So far each major model update has been at least slightly better than the last, in ways I've found useful. Can't say it's perfect, or able to do exactly what I want without a decent amount of instruction/implementation/docs, but it's been useful enough to keep paying for it.

No, this is OpenAI doing the discount, not Openrouter by themselves. OpenAI is crushing it with their 5.6 models, and they probably decided there was no better time to grab as much market share as possible.

I don’t think there’s a real answer for this. It depends on whatever number the accounting department wants to make up.

Do you include research and training costs? Of all models or only the ones being served? What percent of the R&D budget do you allocate to inference? What about data center capacity? Do you count future commitments? All the circular financing deals? Do you count employee equity grants as costs? At what valuation?

OpenAI didn't cut the price of Sol by 50% like they did with Luna's 80%. Sol was unchanged. This is just a limited promo for OpenRouter non-BYOK.

Which raises the question - who is subsidizing this, and why?

Right? Should we switch from direct OpenAI API integration to OpenRouter?

What's the incentive here?

Open Responses API doesn't appear to support state management (yet)

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I've found it to be great for planning code changes (or new projects). I use the superpowers plug-in which I think guides the planning.

Then I switch models (to luna) before implementation. I find this combo nearly always does what I want.

I also use a skill called ponytail, its goal is to keep things terse and edits small. It may have contributed to the successes above.

I like that skills are easy to try out, too.

You would probably get better results with Luna for the real simple tasks, or Sol with low thinking effort.

I find that I get exactly the effort that I asked for, which is pretty nice. The other side of that coin is that these are the least lazy models I’ve used so far. They will go on elaborate tangents to complete the task when I want them to.

I've found it's worse for simple tasks too, and I have to give it stricter guidelines, and sometimes it doesn't follow the same patterns I've grown to expect. I've found using 5.6 (sol) is good for diagnosing issues though, especially in terms of optimization of some given path

Yep. I have not yet had a single good experience with Sol or the 5.6 models on a variety of harnesses and configurations. It overthinks, overcomplicates and often makes my code into an unmaintainable sludge. It'll usually take 5+ turns of steering to get it in the right direction.

It's your responsibility to set an appropriate level of Thinking. For simple tasks, I use the instant model. As an approximation, the choice is proportional to the amount of time I want it spending on the task. Also, you can always ask it to respond succinctly.