> My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish.

Grok has its own feel too. It's not as bad as Claude, but one of the things that bugs me is that it is far too terse.

It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about.

I find I often have to ask it to re-explain what it means.

FYI a quick fix for claudish is to ask for the response to be in ASD-STE100 (Simple Technical English). Then it is far more readable. But I would agree that this is an annoyance and shouldn't require user workaround to get something readable.

For what it's worth - over the last few years or whatever, it seems like Anthropic benchmaxxes the least.

That being said, I currently prefer Sol / Astra to Opus / Fable as I find both to be a better cost payoff to me.

> I simply cannot stand Claudish

I totally agree, it’s like that as models become more intelligent, they are less understandable by most of people... but aren’t we humans doing the same?

Perhaps you haven't had the chance to use it, but 3.8 flash is the best model for talking too. Even routing Claudes output through 3.8 to have it explain whats going on is a breath of fresh air

$0.50 for cache reads, which is 25% of input. While other models are 10% of input.

And like that grok4.7 cache reads are more expensive than sol's (at $0.40/mil).

I've found grok 4.6 speaks heavily in Claudish. It especially likes using verbs as nouns.

> My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english.

I don't know if it's the plain english or what, but I really like Grok for legal research (as opposed to code). It's got a noticeable edge in getting to the point compared to Opus 5.

I actually love fable 5.1 prose. Before I was always on GPT models and I despised the writing. Actually I despised the writing they would do in the markdown docs, the writing in the responses was good. But there was always this weird thing that in the responses the model would write very clear explanations. Then if you ask it to document it what it ends up writing in the .md files is way too verbose, robotically lists facts and omits reasoning and gotchas. Too much unnecessary detail and too little detail it actually needed to capture. I absolutely hated GPT writing. Fable 5.1 though has the same concise, dense but logical and clear prose in both the responses and the documentation and the in-line code comments (oh yea Sol never wrote in-line code comments; and most of the time it deleted existing comments of code it didn’t even touch).

So yea, I find fable 5.1 writing to be excellent everywhere. I still use Sol daily though, but for things like config, quick research, fixes, code review etc. Feature work and writing is for fable 5.1.

Token price doesn't tell you much without knowing token efficiency.

> Claudish

I do wonder why a frontier model does this to be honest. It still does good coding wise, but it seems strange to me. r/Claude is full of "load bearing" jokes in every thread.

> I find the post cursor groks are phenomenal at frontend web development, though Claude is much better at backend ruby.

Wonder if we'd benefit from a much more specialized + task-specific benchmarks to paint a clearer picture like this. A benchmark solely for frontend, ruby, hardware, etc.

Really? I’ve found that when working on my game I can’t let Grok write any text over about 8 words (tooltips for instance) or it will write the most horrendous incomprehensible slop - totally full of invented jargon, Claude-style weird grammar

I've noticed Chatgpt 5.6 Sol High, on the chat interface, inventing words that are a mixture of Portuguese and English. Like "hardcodar" a mix of "hardcode" and the most common verb ending in Portuguese "-ar". Some don't have a single google hit

Using a variety of models feels similar to the benefit of having a team of individuals from different backgrounds.

For me Grok finds legit bug that Fable and Astra miss so I always run it as part of code review

Looking at AA and Vals, your theory seems to check out.

I expect the next Anthropic release to finally reduce the prevalence of Claudish

You don't have to go into conspiracy mode about this. Musk clearly stated on X the other day that they delayed the release because they got some thing wrong with the RL behavior.

it's definitely not bigger. smaller if anything looking at how much faster it is

Grok and Zai have both been excellent as adjunct code-reviews, on their cheapest plans, for me. Fable plans, Opus writes, Codex as primary reviewer, but Grok and Zai usually find something worth fixing that the others have missed. Both are well worth whatever the $20 or so I'm paying for them

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I do not understand how anyone can seriously use a tool that has "Be funny and irreverent when appropriate" baked into the system prompt.

I don't want to waste money because my calculator is cracking jokes. They don't deserve their paltry 5% marketshare or whatever it is they have currently. I'm not even getting into Musk as a person or the horrid things we've seen Grok spit out on twitter. I just don't trust his companies with my data and I have seen very little evidence that it's ever the best tool for the job. I'm sure those cases exist but I can't imagine it's worth it.