I have 200MAX subscription for Anthropic and a RTX 5070TI 16gb GPU. I only use Claude.AI web chat and I only use Opus4.7. I build my prompts on prem with Qwen3.8:latest and copy paste them in claude.ai. I never type anything into claude.ai I am merely a copy pasting monkey. If I need to adjust something I do it from the the on prem prompt. I download code bundles from Claude.AI and push them to my git repo I host. I instruct claude to not do any testing and only let me do testing on my machine so i am not wasting claude resources. The point is to minimize the claude agents from doing anything but specifically doing coding. I can do this for 12 hours a day and reach about 80% of my weekly usage. Once I get to 3 hours left on my weekly I start a fresh chat session with Fable5 and have it do blind code reviews on everything. I only do this because I want to max out my weekly allotment and fable will get me to 20% in 3 hours on a 200MAX sub. Sometimes Fable5 does something interesting but for the most part my on prem static and dynamic code analysis have kept everything buttoned up.
Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
181–190 of 740 posts
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#182They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains. But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _…
The other thing I forgot to mention about Opus 5 is that at least out of the gate, it seemed very intent on spinning up agents and obliterating my token budget. It was noticeably more token hungry than 4.8. It would make sense for them to intend this behavior.
This is likely because of your thinking level. The difference between max and ultracode is primarily that the latter is max with a bunch of agents.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#183People understand the law of diminishing marginal returns.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other thing I forgot to mention about Opus 5 is that at least out of the gate, it seemed very intent on spinning up agents and obliterating my token budget. It was noticeably more token hungry than 4.8. It would make sense for them to intend this behavior.
This is likely because of your thinking level. The difference between max and ultracode is primarily that the latter is max with a bunch of agents.
Did they change the default perhaps? I didn't touch anything with thinking level in that time.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Anthropic wants a stable experience on their consumer subscription plans. It is just used for customer acquisition who will then ask their employer to pay for enterprise plan(assuming most employer care about data control) which is based on tokens. Most coders don't pay for tokens themselves. It's just on reddit and HN you would think that everybody does.
I pay for my tokens for my own projects, at least when the ones Google seems willing to keep throwing at me for free don't cut it. I'd think that's not too uncommon, especially here where there's likely a high ratio of hobby coders (whether also professionals or otherwise).
I also pay but just the $20 plan and just for chats/lightweight personal site editing. I get unlimited token usage from my company.
In my company the average claude token usage is something like $5k/month/employee. Most hobby coders don't spend anywhere close to it.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#186Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly? Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or g…
I'm not an expert by any means whatsoever but deploying models is not a straightforward task. There's a lot of levers to pull and I bet when models get "downgraded" to older hardware they do so WITHOUT the same stringent quality control of the output as they do when they release it.
I don't think it's something deliberately malicious like planned obsolescence but it's more like startup culture of "just make it fit in this sprint".
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#187Honestly, this makes a lot of sense to me. Devs that are good at their job don't need the absolute best model for every task, and if a cheaper model gets the job done 95% as well, it's a pretty easy choice
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dario said in an interview that they originally wanted to be an enterprise only company.
What changed their mind?
I would guess that it's hard to compete with Google without a consumer component. Most enterprises already have contracts and policies with Google, so anything driven from the top-down is likely to prefer Google.
(And failing that, there was a real risk for OpenAI to be the default for enterprises.)
To defeat that, you need to frontline employees the chance to experience better tooling and models which is where the subsidized subscriptions come in.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#189Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly? Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or g…
I definitely agree. I honestly cannot do tasks that require even minor complexity. Opus 5 keeps forgetting things in context as well and coding conventions. Really cannot build with CC without Fable.
Re: Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates. Where can I find these stats?
The article has a chart with this data. They credit “Ramp AI index”. The chart’s a bit confusing though, like what are the units of the y-axis?
Also on a dark reader? It says at the bottom, but gets dimmed out pretty seriously with dark reading. It's a 7 day average business spend, relative to June 1st (2025 presumably) indexed at 100.