Do other people find 5.6 to be worse at most simple tasks and frequently over complicate things? I asked it to write a user todo and it turned out a four page essay. I gave the same task to 5.4 and got the small list of checkboxes I expected.
I've found it to be great for planning code changes (or new projects). I use the superpowers plug-in which I think guides the planning. Then I switch models (to luna) before implementation. I find this combo nearly always does what I want. I also use a skill called ponytail, its goal is to keep things terse and edits small. It may have contributed to the successes above. I like that skills are easy to try out, too.
After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally.
Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less. After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues. Fab…
I used over a billion tokens per day of gpt-5.6 sol xhigh starting last Wednesday through Sunday before reaching my reset limit. The $200 pro plan is still the best deal.
A billion a day? How many agents are you running?
That's wild. I was gonna say 3-5 billion a month is more reasonable summed across all token types.
The title looks to be misleading, since this price cut is limited to OpenRouter. It does not apply for the native OpenAI price listed at https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol
Luna saw a huge jump after the price cut and is one of the more competitive models at the new price on openrouter. Maybe they want to see how much market they can grab with Sol? This might help but there are already cheaper models with Sol's intelligence more or less, the most notable being Grok 4.6 at $6/m which makes it a tougher sell
It's really only between Anthropic and OpenAI for many of my use cases, since I have a Zero Data Retention agreement with both. I'm not trusting random inference providers and especially not Elmo with sensitive data.
You do not have a ZDR with Anthropic.
For Mythos and even Fable they require prompt retention on their end.
edit: or more precisely if you want to access Mythos/Fable ZDR does not apply, and depending on config the exclusion can affect other models.
I spent $800 in a few hours when my sub maxed out because I was trying to get something done and had a long car ride to let it churn. Their api pricing is absurdly expensive.
> Their api pricing is absurdly expensive. I assume at this point that it subsidizes subscriptions.
yes, it absolutely does.
I've gotten more work done on a second chatgpt pro $100/mo subscription than I did with ~$150 of paying for usage through the app.
I think Fable's dominance is overstated. It definitely has the lead, but quantifying what that lead actually is is really hard. I'm using GPT 5.6 Sol to do some shit that I personally would consider "crazy" - low level undocumented hardware driver alchemy, reverse engineering highly obfuscated code, even a bit of screwing around with a rendering engine in Vulkan, really just about the most complex tasks I can get any…
things that are alchemical are rarely alchemy. That is to say things are very fiddly but stick a room of monkeys on typewriters, a schizophrenic developer with HolyC and adderall or an LLM, persistence is the key to many of these things like drivers, extracting keys from vintage security domains, etc. Dropping into xdd to a human is a chore, not for an LLM.
Although I am not exactly sure what you mean, I am not really claiming it is doing anything I couldn't do - but yes, it does so with much less effort. For example, I can have it set up probes and tracing on Linux that I personally would have to consult documentation to do. It might not even have to consult the documentation due to having the information on-tap, but even if it does, it's nothing that would cause it any fatigue, it's just going to keep moving forward in a loop until it is satisfied that it meets the criteria. I could've done all of this alone - I really could have. I just would not have. Being able to do something 10 times faster or with 10 times less effort is, in some senses, sometimes more impactful than being able to do entirely new things you couldn't do before.
Luna saw a huge jump after the price cut and is one of the more competitive models at the new price on openrouter. Maybe they want to see how much market they can grab with Sol? This might help but there are already cheaper models with Sol's intelligence more or less, the most notable being Grok 4.6 at $6/m which makes it a tougher sell
It's really only between Anthropic and OpenAI for many of my use cases, since I have a Zero Data Retention agreement with both. I'm not trusting random inference providers and especially not Elmo with sensitive data.
or Tinfoil [0]? They serve open models with container integrity attested by Nvidia/AMD enclaves. Every cloud provider offers this of course, but not usually in a way that can be shared between distrusting users for economical inference. It still relies on the open-source containers being secure, and there's probably hardware sidechannels and stuff, but personally (ie privacy not liability) I trust it more than a contract
After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally.
Sol is way too eager to hone in on small details and ends up with massive over-engineering. Fable does it too - to be fair - but noticeably less. After extensively using both on Max 20x plans, I've concluded that Fable is better for problem solving and coding, whereas Sol 5.6 Ultra shines in debugging specific issues: tackle a problem with Fable then leverage Sol to clean up, double check, or fix specific issues. Fab…
Interesting the use of Max and Ultra. I don’t doubt the complexity, but would someone use Max or Ultra on Typescript or Go, for example?
Is it more about just avoiding any mistakes? Seems like that would be costly when medium or high would work fine?
I used over a billion tokens per day of gpt-5.6 sol xhigh starting last Wednesday through Sunday before reaching my reset limit. The $200 pro plan is still the best deal.
A billion tokens per day?? Plausible estimates put the energy use at about 0.001 Wh/token, which means you're using 1000 kWh/day in electricity, just to generate slop. That's about the same as 50-100 houses. 300kg of CO2 per day - roughly the same as flying from London to New York every three days . I think on average AI energy usage is not as big a deal as everyone is panicking about, but your usage is truly absurd…
1. You do not know what they're using it for.
2. Get off your high horse please.
3. Immoral my ass.