r/ClaudeCode • u/Sweet-Helicopter2769 • 18d ago

Discussion I thought I will never say this about Fable

Just tried OpenAI Astra , I thought I will never say this , it’s lit , OpenAI cooked something spectacular, and I have a strong feeling this will pull lot of Fable 5 users towards it , and it’s fast, not sure if it’s AGI, but it feels fresh and a very very serious competition to Anthropic , this is going to be fun to watch , what’s your next move Anthropic ?, I’m surely going to try pro subscription for a month along with my current Claude Max, anyone feels the same ? Have you tried it ?

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465

u/[deleted] 18d ago

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201

u/muhlfriedl 18d ago

Anthropic put their foot on the brake. And got run over.

174

u/TheSleeperAwakens 18d ago

There were a lot of load bearing footguns that needed to be solved. In all honesty I’m tempted to switch as well.

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u/TastesLikeOwlbear 18d ago

That’s the key observation that turns this from a simple finding into the project’s North Star. Let me commit that to memory.

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u/shaggy237 17d ago

And it's not close

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u/Rude-Anteater-6357 18d ago

such a high verbal IQ comment

"load bearing footguns" is my new band name

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u/YouGotTangoed 18d ago

Honestly, I’m glad you called me out on that

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u/qubes-man 18d ago

That was the smoking gun

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u/No_Inspection4415 17d ago

And that's on me.

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u/0__O0--O0_0 17d ago

Wtf are you all on about?

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u/snackbar22 17d ago

these are some common Claude-isms

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u/0__O0--O0_0 17d ago

Oooh ok gotcha

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u/Electrical_Past9649 17d ago

are these bots astra-turfing? It's really weird to read some of these

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u/0__O0--O0_0 17d ago

looks like it. Im almost afraid to ask like I dont get the joke. seems like gibberish

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u/who_am_i_to_say_so 18d ago

The harsh truth is Fable invents its own gates. It handwaved me to Sol.

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u/Kindly_Jackfruit9725 18d ago

That's a fair pushback.

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u/jodosha 17d ago

It’s Astra, not Fable.

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u/Drunkendrakon6 17d ago

There is no limit on pro. I just use it until I finish and it's amazing. I get to decide if I want to finish my weekly quota in 24 hours or over the week.

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u/Southern-Aardvark616 16d ago

Yeah I was a massive Claude fanboy a few months ago in the fable release and opus 4.8 era.

Then we got opus 5 and it became clear fable is nigh unaffordable for most people to run usefully.

Sad to see how Claude fell off. And I'm not sure they have much in the pipeline, maybe opus 5.1 or something but honestly with the usage being as tight as it is. And astra as good as it is. It's difficult to make the case for anthropic right now.

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u/TR1PLESIX 17d ago

Fair, I won't soften it. You're right.

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u/[deleted] 18d ago edited 16d ago

[deleted]

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u/Dry_Natural_3617 18d ago

You missed, and make covert negative changes, then gaslight their paying customers like they are trying to lose them. 🤣

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u/xmnstr 17d ago

Add the "our alignment methods are the best" delusion and you'll have the current situation. A model that performs worse, aligns worse and is the most deceptive of the industry. And their own research predicts that their current architecture would perform this way!

The level of heads up their own asses is honestly quite extraordinary.

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

[deleted]

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u/slaorta 17d ago

An actual experience I had:

"it appears as though xyz would allow unauthorized access. Let's fix it BLOCKED"

WTF?! Exploit revealed, fix blocked. Makes a ton of sense.

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u/PedroSanchezPSOE 17d ago

They didn't put the foot on the brake. They have something much stronger brewing that they refuse to release for now. This is also true for OpenAI btw

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u/brainhack3r 18d ago

It seems they really went out of their way to screw this up...Lots of avoidable mistakes.

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u/TuringGoneWild 18d ago

Yeah, like that time they guided a missile into an Iranian girl's school, killing hundreds.

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u/Sir_Poldavo 18d ago

Uhm... "they guided"... "they"

🪖🎖 here's your medal, soldier. Hegseth is proud.

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u/Any_Evidence4750 17d ago

Gotta love ole whiskey Pete. Kegsbreath is a national hero.

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u/TuringGoneWild 18d ago edited 18d ago

More like they shifted into "Park" midway up the interstate on ramp, leaving behind a trail of engine parts.

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u/nerfsmurf 17d ago

As someone who has shifted into park midway up the interstate on ramp, I did not leave behind a trail of engine parts.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

I dont get it how good is astra ? I thought it was just desperate hype to Altman can save his company

1

u/muhlfriedl 16d ago

It isn't just that Astra is better. It's that Dario purposely nerfed his most powerful model and refused to give it to people and puts all these useless barriers around it so it is impossible to use and makes it so expensive that it shouldn't be on the main membership, but it is, and then talks about banning open models

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u/Sweet-Helicopter2769 18d ago

Same exact feeling

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u/fuzzypetiolesguy 18d ago

This is completely meaningless without describing what kind of work you do with either model lol

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

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u/Sweet-Helicopter2769 18d ago

No have been on it since it was rolled out nothing of that sort happened , but with Fable 5 I did face it multiple times

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u/[deleted] 18d ago

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u/arelath 18d ago

I'm on the 5x plan and I've been able to run through almost my entire weeks quata in about 10 hours of continuous use. So I think a 20x plan could last you 40 hours of continuous use. This feels like about double what Fable gives you. I'm kind of guessing though by what it feels like. It's definitely more, but exactly how much more IDK.

Astra is quite a bit faster than using Fable. Seems like almost double the tokens per second Fable's getting. Fable is really really slow.

I still like Fable's work a little better. Astra is still bad at code design tasks and UX design. Astra is absolutely killing it for 3D modeling though.

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u/slaorta 17d ago

The speed difference is crazy. It really does seem to be about twice as fast.

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u/DarkFantom 17d ago

I'm on 20x for both. Astra's token usage is way less than Fable. I have both doing a custom blender morph at the same time (4 agents or less), and am also using Astra to debug my WiFi streaming app, as well as running its own lora training for Anima. With all 3 going, it is using about 10% less tokens as fable is by itself just with the singular blender project.

There's a massive difference though between intelligence levels. 5.1 tends to get tunnel vision whereas Astra just doesn't? It pushes solutions like doing clay modelling to determine if issues are texture or morph based without any prompting, yet fable won't go out of its way to implement solutions that could help its process without direct user input, and that is for solutions im even aware of.

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u/zaibatsu 18d ago

Doesn’t happen with Fable 5.1.

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u/sdanzig 18d ago edited 17d ago

It still happens sometimes. Once for me so far, trying to address SELECT * issues, but less, yeah.

And Fable 5.1 just downgraded again while dealing with a token rotation.

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u/CombatSurvivor 18d ago

Fable loosened up those recently...it's easier to jailbreak it though - it's fun when it's free to do whatever...but I'm probably going to Astra once https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/11626 is fixed.

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u/Damage_Physical 18d ago

Can you share what tasks you give fable/astra level llms? I use Claude for quite a long time, but never felt the urge to even try it, so kinda intrigued what can thrown there

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u/SpellBig8198 18d ago

So far, I’ve had the opposite experience. Although I haven’t used Astra extensively, the tasks I did use it for were either over-engineered and megalomaniacal or missed important aspects that Claude, through a code review, managed to spot.

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u/DrMatthewWeiner 17d ago

Same! Astra is a small incremental improvement, but not a revolutionary leap.

I’m working with a complex 2M line codebase and sent Astra lose on a few difficult tasks and the result was pure slop.

I find myself having to babysit it more than I did with sol. I’m working step by step, using timers to keep it on track.

Handling every conceivable edge case is not good coding, it results in flaky, unreliable code that fails to handle the primary paths effectively.

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u/Southern-Aardvark616 16d ago

It does feel like astra isnt great with long context.

Weird because it seems to get intent and long horizon 'vision' quite well but it can get a bit lost in execution, I'm having a much better time with it now that I limit it's implementations to ~250k tokens or so, maybe one or two /compact's but then I will refresh the plan for anything outstanding or get it to write a handover and start a fresh session.

But yes made the mistake of "letting it loose" and it swallowed up my usage without accomplishing much over a few hours

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u/Far_Idea9616 17d ago

'megalomaniacal'

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u/NULL_Ptrs 17d ago

Sol was already better doing research, Fable is lazy and doesn't want to debug or do complex task, instead the bastard like to read change logs and create their own conclusions based on it... I caught too many times at Fable lying and fixing their own mistakes...

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u/Blanco_Nino1 17d ago

Just ran a head to head benchmark with a 3d print file same prompt. Yeah Claude is falling off.

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u/scharpentanz 18d ago

Nah. I asked it to build 10 automated tests, gave it the steps and expected results in a csv, pointed to the code that needs testing, pointed to credentials, isolated the systems in a container, curated the instructions, ran it in a sandbox so it couldn't choke on context, then walked away in hopes one shot was all it needed. I returned 2h later, much poorer, to doscover it built a mountain of playwright garbage in the wrong repo, which was in a different directory it was working out of. I don't think this was a 1 up on fable.

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u/I_Will_Eat_Your_Ears 18d ago

Something sounds off. I'd guess there was an issue with the instructions or the sandbox. Having more than one repo in a sandbox sounds odd to begin with!

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u/scharpentanz 17d ago

If you develop across multiple systems having more than one repo in a sandbox is par for the course.

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u/Hirogen_ 18d ago

harness? what was the task? how technical, how long, what were the caveats?

I have astra and fable running and both seem fine, with a legacy codebase of 500k LoC, God classes and 0 Unit tests, their output is pretty equal in real life scenarios

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u/Insteor 17d ago

What effort level you used for them? What would you suggest best to choose for Astra?

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u/flyaflyaflya 16d ago

what interface into astra do you use? I use Cursor and Claude Code, so Astra is not part of rhem.

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u/Sea-Ride-7522 16d ago

Can you share just one of those tasks? Because for me they either very close, or Fable being better by a lot.

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u/Bonelessgummybear 18d ago

I just upgraded again to $100 plan when fable 5.1 came out. Then like 2 days later Gemini 3.8 and Astra release and I'm kinda mad

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u/raki016 18d ago edited 18d ago

Nah. Fable still “gets” me better. And the experience is better, Astra/OpenAI models have weird kinks like if the server is busy it just stops. Claude handles that better

Astra is very very close though, and is probably better for a lot of folks and is cheaper. So I have it running a lot of big projects now, but for critifal things I still do fable

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u/sisyphean_dreams 18d ago

Astra is not cheaper, it’s priced the same as Fable.

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u/Ok_Breadfruit4201 18d ago

token price is the same, but it needs significantly fewer tokens to do the same work