[theptip]

I think you need to consider how much dev mindshare you get from the loss-leader. Claude has grown at an insane rate. They brought vibe-coding mainstream.

At some point they might decide they have enough demand and inertia from enterprise to reduce the subsidy. But to say “it’s doomed” really misses the fact that it has already been immensely successful.

[visarga]

We can switch in a heartbeat to a competitor, what kept us to Claude was that it had better models for a while. Closing Fable off means they are squarely inferior now.

For me Opus 4.8 was a slow model with a strong habit of talking down to me in an obnoxious way that would not be possible to prompt away. GPT 5.5 is now my main driver for serious work.

[miki123211]

In my experience, all Anthropic models tend to produce hard-to-understand word soup. They're like the kind of person who likes to use fancy words just to show you how much smarter they are.

That doesn't mean those models are stupid or just pretending. I do think that Fable is the best we can get right now. Nevertheless, I prefer OpenAI models for easier tasks where the primary output is text and explanations, not code.

[AbstractH24]

I’m still rattled by all the DoD stuff in the spring. At which point I deleted my ChatGPT/OpenAI account.

But Anthropic’s games with Fable and false humility is getting a bit old. And increasingly it seems like Agent Orange is gonna implode rather than team up with someone like Sam Altman to form America’s Third Reich. Particularly post-midterms.

Nonetheless, wish there was a third option on par with them two. Maybe there is I need to investigate.

[theptip]

Agreed that switching costs to Codex are quite low (not zero due to harness, prompt, and skill differences), but only because OpenAI is running the same loss-leader strategy.

[yehosef]

I use them all https://github.com/yehosef/llm-tools

[verall]

I think it's for the insane amount of data they get to collect. Most people probably don't turn off the "help improve other models" while corporations paying by the token have blanket no-train policies applied to everyone.

[theptip]

Yeah that is definitely an angle too.