alt Hacker NewsI've gone back to 4.8.
5 would constantly veer of in random directions if not working from 100% strict and narrow instructions.
I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope - because the model is clearly smaller or more economical for Anthropic no doubt about it, and the benchmaxxing they do is pure marketing bs - Fable in my view has also been not much better than 4.6 or 4.8 after a few days, disregarding the insane amounts of astroturfing and marketing everywhere.
Theres thousands of threads of twitter, reddit and the internet at large but silence here. Weird but not weird as crypto bs was also insufferably rampant here for a while.
Personally i think we've hit the top of the subsidisation phase and prices will probably 10-15x soon as foreshadowed with both API price policy changes from all the big providers, and now the 1100% deepseek API price changes from yesterday, this could domino into a market implosion and an AI winter, because expecting growth from the bizarre bubble carousel investments with little ROI atm is just not viable.
A bit worried about this as i've already grown quite accustomed to these tools.
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I have a chunky bit of functionality in my hobby app using babylon.js to render 3D worlds using things like portals and LoD rendering to manage the visual load. I built it out with a combo of Fable and Opus 5.
I too got fed up with the prose of Opus in particular, and tried going back. Unfortunately, the previous models were less able to hack it. The prose was better but progress was worse.
It wasn't just conversation and comments. Some of the function names were wild. Like it instead of something like "isSolidWall(x)" it would write something like "weightyNotEphemeral(x)" or something - that's not quite it, but it really did embed overwrought antithesis into the identifier instead of a straightforward positive predicate.
Yeah. I set my default back to 4.6 and only use 5 for code review etc. Also save s alot of tokens...
We can use OpenRouter pricing to get an idea about what competitive inference pricing is like without R&D or other costs, and indeed we'd be screwed if we had to pay those rates. We'd go from 100-200 USD to 2000-4000 USD/m.
It is bizarre. There has been no statement, no mention of even hearing concern about Opus 5.
I presume something is forthcoming, but it may be they don’t want to come empty handed—-5.1 is intended to “fix the glitch.”
yeah I feel the same way with Opus 5 too. If I ask it to do something, it would go ahead and rewrite unrelated things and then in a less performant version of it.
I’ve instead moved to GLM, at least it has the courtesy to ask some steps of the way what I wanted exactly and only work on what I asked.
>it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope
Sol and Fable are great; we haven't hit a peak, Anthropic just tried to pull a fast one on its customers with Opus 5.0.
Opus 5 has a habit of taking what I asked for, doing something tangentially related to it, and then lying to me and saying it did exactly what I asked.
> I find it weird there's not more discussion here on HN on how the most used model now has clearly degraded in quality and it seems we've hit a peak and are on a downslope
It's not weird, because it's an anecdote, not an accepted fact.
Personally I've not been too happy with Opus 5, but I've had similar experiences with other models previously, feeling like they didn't quite fit with my working style.
So nothing indicates we've hit a peak.