I am because Claude has figured out I am a biochemist and therefore even asking Fable what the weather is gets me bumped back to Opus, sometimes even Opus 4.8 instead of 5. Kimi? GLM 5.3? DeepSeek? No such problem.

I can literally open a new chat with just "Hello" and it gets bumped.

Just cancelled my Claude subscription and used Ox Alpha Free through OpenCode (so that's one).

In my view, from the testing I did since Thursday, it's better than Fable. I had just finished a rather large task that Fable completed, including a /review and an /ultrareview.

Ox Alpha found bugs that Fable and Opus missed, and it continued to build things like a pro.

It does have issues with availability - but it's on a free promo right now. That also means that I don't know how much it would have cost if I had to pay API prices for it, which might not be cheaper than the subsidized small company / consumer usage, but for large companies paying API prices for either offering, the difference will be considerable.

I almost feel like there's some sort of paid campaign going on in Hacker News promoting the Chinese/open models. I feel like every day I'm hearing about how the frontier labs are dead but your experience is the same as mine. My company pays for Claude AND Codex but we never really use the open models for anything critical.