> For Fable 5, we made this safety margin much larger than in any prior launch (row B), meaning that many more benign requests would be blocked. We understood that these kinds of false positives would be frustrating for users, but made this tradeoff in the interest of making the model’s other capabilities widely available.
My own experience is that Opus 4.8 has an adversarial-teacher voice, unsolicited grading as if I submitted an essay for grading, declarations about the "real" issue, and constant "honest notes" self grading its own responses even before it answers. I can't stand its tone. We can't have a normal chat.
While Fable reverts to Opus for simple questions like "What is digestion?"
For chatting and getting informations, and be corrected on things you're wrong without being reprimended by your own tool, GPT 5.5/5.6 is way better. Gemini 3.1 pro is surprisingly good at verifying your stuff, even though it's always making mistakes about its own stuff (don't ask him question, but ask him to verify your answer to the question).
Same for graphics, visual consistency, anything around the "does the look make sense and is pleasing" really, which makes claude design such a (good) surprise, I hope very hard for a Codex equivalent. And Gemini "gets" graphics.
Claude is definitely a code and cowork tool first, that's where it shines.
what i dislike more with opus 4.8 is that i can get a straightforward plan, and it just stops after the first 5% to wait for another message, and if i set a goal/ralph loop or anything for it to keep going through the plan, it cancels the loop and proclaims conpletion when its barely started
Same, I was just fighting it as it accused me over and over again of Ctrl+Cing a process that clearly errored out. 3 turns for it to find why the shell script actually crashed.
It's quite obnoxious. I asked if brown rice left in the fridge for a couple days–originally put in for use in fried rices–was still safe. Fable decided I'm trying to produce biotoxins. Which, ironically, prompted me to learn how to produce Bacillus cereus at home [1].
I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].
> I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].
I've been using DuckDuckGo's multi-model service for my "ask an AI random questions" needs. I was already paying them and discovered this LLM thing is part of my subscription. Works pretty well and has privacy guarantees I'd expect out of DDG, though I think they've been tightening the usage you can get out of it recently.
Businesses are usually allowed to refuse service: "Sorry, we're closed" or "sir, this is a Wendy's." There's nothing dystopian about that.
But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.
I do not disagree with business deciding to only provide the service they want, I am not talking about the AI business themselves, I am thinking about the people who think we should remove pages from knowledge book.
Whether the book takes the form of an llm or an online website or a printed book is merely implementation details.
I think no one objects to the refusals in the abstract but rather to the inconsistencies and the presentation. You don't know what request might be refused or downgraded. You do know that the marketing copy and CEO's words present it as being for your own good (or the good of society) instead of plainly stated as a business policy based on business or personal concerns. These aspects are what make it grating and yes, potentially dystopian.
It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days.
It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.
I am ignoring Fable at the moment. It’s on and off available, twice the price and does not seem to be better.
I use Opus 4.8 with OMP/Pi coding agent and Matt Pocock Skills installed. I use professional/polite/questions-based communication pattern with Opus and it seems to work fine for coding. I am always aware that I need to justify my requests so it doesn’t barf.
Of course, I would never use Claude for anything customer-facing. It’s woke to the point of being fanatical.
I love Claude Code and I don't use the rest of the models since I use ChatGPT for productivity work it. Fable is pretty great and the UI / UX is much better than codex
Claude has never been the best Chat agent. GPT and Gemini have the lead there. But Claude chat is still perfectly serviceable if you don’t want to pay for two.
I hate it. A useful tip - Claude goes into what I call Safety Mode when it gets afraid of risk. Once it's in that mode, you will never get out and it lobotomizes its effective intelligence. As soon as Claude sends a message like this, use the "edit message" feature in the chat UI to try again and avoid Safety Mode rather than trying to convince it or redirect it out by continuing the conversation.
Claude always was slightly lobotomized - instead of solving problems intellectually, it often prefers to be a middle-level code monkey. Maybe this was a part of the implicit safe mode from the very beginning. Cursor/Codex always work better for a way lower spend, at least in my experience.
Apart from the 'Approve for me' in Codex where it has massively regressed.
With GPT 5.5 it never got in the way.
Now it's infuriatingly deciding to reject the most basic actions used hundreds of times before. It just gave me this gem:
> The push to GitLab was blocked because the repository's privacy status couldn't be confirmed. Since the code is private, do you explicitly authorize pushing it to the configured origin on gitlab.com, so the merge request can be opened?
This is not a new project, and Codex has opened a hundred merge requests without issue before.
as long as you submit to the cloud's idea of what you're allowed to talk about, it'll keep changing the degree to which you're allowed to drink from the sacred fountain of knowledge.
This is more about how MBAs are wanting to mediate between you and the knowledge than anything else.
But this is what all the tech bros wanted right? Spending 2025 panicking about sycophancy[1] and how GPT-4o needed to be shut down ASAP meant that 2026 models would be prone to thinking they know Better Than You. That was the germ of the sycophancy panic, the idea that there is a Truth that the GPUs know better than the user.
From my point of view, a lot of frustration is tied to LLMs not evolving at the same rate/manner as people around you do.
We're using human language against a system that produces human-like output, which tricks our brain into having similar expectations.
> I suspect Anthropic had to turn up its safety guardrails to an 11 to assuage the government’s concerns, as this hasn’t been a one-model problem.
This behavioral change is actually official (https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5):
> For Fable 5, we made this safety margin much larger than in any prior launch (row B), meaning that many more benign requests would be blocked. We understood that these kinds of false positives would be frustrating for users, but made this tradeoff in the interest of making the model’s other capabilities widely available.
My own experience is that Opus 4.8 has an adversarial-teacher voice, unsolicited grading as if I submitted an essay for grading, declarations about the "real" issue, and constant "honest notes" self grading its own responses even before it answers. I can't stand its tone. We can't have a normal chat.
While Fable reverts to Opus for simple questions like "What is digestion?"
For chatting and getting informations, and be corrected on things you're wrong without being reprimended by your own tool, GPT 5.5/5.6 is way better. Gemini 3.1 pro is surprisingly good at verifying your stuff, even though it's always making mistakes about its own stuff (don't ask him question, but ask him to verify your answer to the question).
Same for graphics, visual consistency, anything around the "does the look make sense and is pleasing" really, which makes claude design such a (good) surprise, I hope very hard for a Codex equivalent. And Gemini "gets" graphics.
Claude is definitely a code and cowork tool first, that's where it shines.
what i dislike more with opus 4.8 is that i can get a straightforward plan, and it just stops after the first 5% to wait for another message, and if i set a goal/ralph loop or anything for it to keep going through the plan, it cancels the loop and proclaims conpletion when its barely started
Same, I was just fighting it as it accused me over and over again of Ctrl+Cing a process that clearly errored out. 3 turns for it to find why the shell script actually crashed.
It's quite obnoxious. I asked if brown rice left in the fridge for a couple days–originally put in for use in fried rices–was still safe. Fable decided I'm trying to produce biotoxins. Which, ironically, prompted me to learn how to produce Bacillus cereus at home [1].
I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913059/ Don't Do It
[2] https://assistant.kagi.com
> I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].
I've been using DuckDuckGo's multi-model service for my "ask an AI random questions" needs. I was already paying them and discovered this LLM thing is part of my subscription. Works pretty well and has privacy guarantees I'd expect out of DDG, though I think they've been tightening the usage you can get out of it recently.
I'll have to try Kagi if DDG gets much tighter.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
(he, in this case, would not be the llm but the people over it)
I find those kind of limitation very dystopian and way more dangerous than the threat they claim to fight against.
Businesses are usually allowed to refuse service: "Sorry, we're closed" or "sir, this is a Wendy's." There's nothing dystopian about that.
But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.
I do not disagree with business deciding to only provide the service they want, I am not talking about the AI business themselves, I am thinking about the people who think we should remove pages from knowledge book.
Whether the book takes the form of an llm or an online website or a printed book is merely implementation details.
I think no one objects to the refusals in the abstract but rather to the inconsistencies and the presentation. You don't know what request might be refused or downgraded. You do know that the marketing copy and CEO's words present it as being for your own good (or the good of society) instead of plainly stated as a business policy based on business or personal concerns. These aspects are what make it grating and yes, potentially dystopian.
> There's nothing dystopian about that.
It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days.
It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.
It’s probably a good idea to know how to use AI tools, but it certainly doesn’t have to be your only source of information.
I am ignoring Fable at the moment. It’s on and off available, twice the price and does not seem to be better.
I use Opus 4.8 with OMP/Pi coding agent and Matt Pocock Skills installed. I use professional/polite/questions-based communication pattern with Opus and it seems to work fine for coding. I am always aware that I need to justify my requests so it doesn’t barf.
Of course, I would never use Claude for anything customer-facing. It’s woke to the point of being fanatical.
> Can AI have mental breakdowns?
I recall Microsoft's Sidney having a hilarious one regarding the date or something. Anyone have a link to that?
I get really sick of Opus 4.8 and Fable telling me things i ask it at work are "out of scope," "not related to my ticket," "not the real problem"...
I decide what is in scope, what I work on, and what needs fixing! It drives me nuts, it's like it's trying to avoid doing work
I love Claude Code and I don't use the rest of the models since I use ChatGPT for productivity work it. Fable is pretty great and the UI / UX is much better than codex
Claude has never been the best Chat agent. GPT and Gemini have the lead there. But Claude chat is still perfectly serviceable if you don’t want to pay for two.
I hate it. A useful tip - Claude goes into what I call Safety Mode when it gets afraid of risk. Once it's in that mode, you will never get out and it lobotomizes its effective intelligence. As soon as Claude sends a message like this, use the "edit message" feature in the chat UI to try again and avoid Safety Mode rather than trying to convince it or redirect it out by continuing the conversation.
Claude always was slightly lobotomized - instead of solving problems intellectually, it often prefers to be a middle-level code monkey. Maybe this was a part of the implicit safe mode from the very beginning. Cursor/Codex always work better for a way lower spend, at least in my experience.
Sol is really good
Apart from the 'Approve for me' in Codex where it has massively regressed.
With GPT 5.5 it never got in the way.
Now it's infuriatingly deciding to reject the most basic actions used hundreds of times before. It just gave me this gem:
> The push to GitLab was blocked because the repository's privacy status couldn't be confirmed. Since the code is private, do you explicitly authorize pushing it to the configured origin on gitlab.com, so the merge request can be opened?
This is not a new project, and Codex has opened a hundred merge requests without issue before.
My claim is that this is due to alignment
as long as you submit to the cloud's idea of what you're allowed to talk about, it'll keep changing the degree to which you're allowed to drink from the sacred fountain of knowledge.
This is more about how MBAs are wanting to mediate between you and the knowledge than anything else.
But this is what all the tech bros wanted right? Spending 2025 panicking about sycophancy[1] and how GPT-4o needed to be shut down ASAP meant that 2026 models would be prone to thinking they know Better Than You. That was the germ of the sycophancy panic, the idea that there is a Truth that the GPUs know better than the user.
[1] HN thread on my post in January https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488396
Goomba fallacy