[ianberdin]

We at Playcode.io - a company similar to Ploy are still using Opus 4.6. "Why?" you might ask.

Because GPT 5.6 Sol, while fast and pleasant to use, is essentially the same model as 5.5 wrapped in new marketing packaging, just to avoid losing ground to Anthropic. In practice, it's the same quality: it generates the same garbage, tons of code, and can never solve even a single complex task. We simply don't trust it to write code for clients that they'll end up throwing away anyway.

"Then why not Opus 4.8?" you might ask.

Well, because Opus 4.8 and 4.7 are just another lie, a price hike with no actual quality improvement.

That's why at Playcode, we give our clients the best possible quality/price - which is Opus 4.6. Regardless of what people write in articles like this.

[Valodim]

Did you just paste your marketing copy into a hn comment?

[ianberdin]

I have already developed a habit of speaking in this format over 10 years of supporting my product.

[ianberdin]

Everyone probably has the same question: what about Fable? Fable 5 is sick.

It is simply the best model in the world out of everything we have ever tried. It's absolutely fantastic. It solves almost any task from start to finish, the way it should be done — no errors, perfect code. It's a miracle.

If there's any way to make it a little more affordable, that would be incredible.

As for GPT-5.6 Sol — it doesn't even come close. I honestly don't understand why people even try to compare them. It feels like Sam's attempt to hold onto his audience with those endless daily limit resets. A clever trick, nothing more.

[porker]

> Fable 5 is sick. [It] solves almost any task from start to finish, the way it should be done — no errors, perfect code. It's a miracle.

> As for GPT-5.6 Sol — it doesn't even come close. I honestly don't understand why people even try to compare them.

What kind of problems are you working on? I like Fable but when planning work on a complex C codebase it's making more mistakes than 5.6 Sol xhigh for me.

In what scenarios is Fable giving you "no errors, perfect code"?

[ianberdin]

I have a large monorepo that includes about 15 TypeScript services and many Rust services. Everything is well-documented and organized, with standardized and structured custom code.

When an issue arises, I often test the systems by providing a minimal prompt, like: "this user, this is their email, this isn't working, figure it out in production." I send this to both Opus and ChatGPT, but it doesn't help. I've set up Agents.md and Quote.md identically, with the same access and linkers, so the Harness is consistent.

ChatGPT rarely succeeds. If the task is complex and requires a multi-step process to identify the true cause, ChatGPT usually stops after a few initial ideas and wrongly claims it has found the solution.

- For simple tasks, like identifying a missing item in a to-do list, ChatGPT performs well. - However, for issues like memory leaks or file system corruption, it struggles.

On the other hand, Opus 4.8 always finds the solution, albeit slowly. I can rely on it without worrying about whether it will succeed. It just gets the job done.

Recently, Fable 5 has emerged, which resolves issues without needing any prompts. It operates even faster than Opus.

When I ask ChatGPT or Opus to create a new feature: - ChatGPT often produces superficial results, ignoring existing code and building unnecessary independent code. - Interestingly, the outcome from ChatGPT appears functional, but it's usually incorrect, focusing on a superficial "aha!" moment.

Opus, however, plans thoroughly, executes, and cleans up, ensuring everything works correctly. If needed, I can provide more realistic examples, though it's challenging due to the monorepo's size and complexity, with hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

[yruzin]

Claude is Extremely slow, especially fast few days. Codex is so much faster in in my opinion with comparable quality. Anthropic is going to fix their problems, but for me as a user that depends for the service to work, it's not acceptable. ChatGPT 5.5 is already a better version than Opus 4.8, at lest in my experience. Firstly, thing get done today and I don't see quality to be worse. I has many situation where Opus was just going in circles, finding more and more issues with the code it wrote a few hours back, to me this is counterproductive.

[ianberdin]

Btw, we wrote an article about real prices of frontier models: https://playcode.io/blog/real-price-of-frontier-models. Usually people talk about announced price, not real one.

[mattclarkdotnet]

For PCB design 5.6 Sol/Terra is streets ahead of 5.5, and uses fewer tokens, so I'm not sure it can really be the same model.