I'll be using it tonight but grudgingly so. Grudgingly because after July 7th, I'm not going to all of a sudden, start paying API prices (and maybe that's the problem) when I'm used to a subscription that gives me multiples in comparative value. Perhaps this is the fabled "token economics will come for everyone this year" that I've been reading about? In any case, I'll use the hell out of it to extract as much as I can, then back to the trusted partners Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 (for however long they remain available).
The token quota is completely unpredictable and changes month to month. Anthropic has a real penchant for riding the fine line of useful and dark patterns that make me want to write them off forever.
On the xhigh effort level (not ultracode!), and at the beginning of a new 5h session, I asked it to review a branch that has 300 lines changed/added, and went to grab a coffee. When I was back after a couple minutes, I saw that it decided to create a dynamic workflow with 60 something agents and hit session limits on my max plan.
When I'm subscribing to their plans, I have the expectation that I'll be able to get some reasonable amount of work done. These days, this expectation was already not being met for me with Opus, and Fable acting like this was the final nail in the coffin.
I cancelled my plan and I'm looking for alternatives.
The claims of 4.6 or 4.7 being superior genuinely make me laugh. Adapt your workflow if needed and use the superior model instead of just kneejerk believing they actually enshittified a model with zero evidence except vibes on an undeterministic model output. Jesus.
4.6 was the last model that let you disable adaptive thinking and set max thinking token budget. I liked having that available, and still use it sometimes.
Many of the improvements are the result of agentic loops and an emphasis on autonomy. Some of us don’t like that because the models go rogue and ignore design patterns, architecture, coding guidelines or other things that are important.
My friends and colleagues that like the agentic autonomy don’t care about the code, they feel like if it works it works and if an AI system is the only intelligence able to understand it that is ok.
It was quite clear 4.7 was a dumbed down high efficiency model they put out in a rush to handle the capacity issues they were having at the time. I've experienced myself substantial degradation on basic reasoning tasks, which were fixed in 4.8.
In my case it that I'm tired and more likely to miss issues or mistakes. My idea of good enough is at a much lower level when it's 10pm and I'm about to knock off and go to bed in an hour.
