I’ve found Sol performance to be incredibly spiky. It has tremendous IQ and can fix very difficult bugs. But it is horrible at design (both visual and system design), anything that involves thinking about users or UX, and massively overcomplicates almost all work.
I noticed the same. I wanted a simple crud webapp and suggested an insane techstack involving C#, Razor Pages, MSSQL and more. I went with my planned setup of python flask with an sqlite db which served me well for years.
It's still incredibly important to have a human in the loop correcting design decisions and having good taste.
> massively overcomplicates almost all work
People with high IQ often do this IRL. There's training tension in this area. Intelligence and overcomplication correlate and are hard to extricate.
I vastly prefer Sol. It does what I tell it to almost exactly, pretty much every time.
I work on very low level stuff (think RTL/FPGA, firmware, software where optimising for nanoseconds is just normal).
For me Sol is the only cost effective model available. Fable 5.1 is indeed good and vastly better than original Fable (which refused to work on most of my stuff for 'safety' reasons).
It's very good at this sort of low level stuff to the point that I really can't understand/relate to people having a good time with Opus (which comparatively performs extremely poorly on my particular workload).
I also just don't like how lazy Anthropic models are. They will do 10% of what is asked and then summarily declare victory.
Sol on the other hand is more like "one of us", slight touch of the 'tism, extremely pedantic, will go to the edge of the known universe if that is what it takes to prove/fix/build what you asked for or run out out of credits trying.
It's a personal and workload dependent thing. For me right now Sol for 99% of stuff because Fable 5.1 still burns through $5k in credits a day.