Not to sound like a mark, I try to not get attached to any of these providers.

I've jumped between copilot, claude, gemini and chatgpt since the start of the year. chatgpt wasn't even worth looking at early this year.

Anthropic has the smarter models for sure, and seems to be default in corporate. However, the amount of budget you get with GPT as a user is much better, the harness feels more polished, and the models are faster. They are also much nicer to work with, I can just read the output for the most part. With claude I get pages of text and need to skim to find where the actual information i need to care about lies. So much more cognitive overhead.

Sol is smart enough for anything I've thrown at it, it's not one-shotting like fable, but I'm more willing to actually go back and forth with it, and it's likely producing better output to keep a human in the loop rather than trying to solve the world independently and making multiple incorrect assumptions.

I think GPT sees the market changing and is correctly repositioning themselves. Anthropic is down the wrong road, and if they don't correct course quickly I'm sure many of those enterprise contracts will start pivoting.

I really would like to see OpenAI’s focus on efficiency but everytime I use Codex, it wastes tokens like there’s no tomorrow, hitting week limit in a day, where I’m able to use Claude just fine. Maybe it’s based on the codebase, I don’t know, but I have better results with Claude than Codex.

You've articulated what I found unsettling about Boris' pov that "coding is a solved problem". I listened to a few of his talks and was instinctively off-put by that sentiment. I figured a fellow programmer would understand and speak on the nuances.

Granted it did make me think about my biases and to lean into more future facing inevitabilities. But you've nailed it, for Boris and Anthropic, they are betting that coding is a solved problem in the sense that any person can one-shot any random idea and the output will be in some abstract sense "good". And then at what cost and toward what end?

> who wins the long-term race

Isn’t the race between Chinese open-weight models and the others more decisive for the future?

If the problem isn't that hard, I've been using Cursor's Auto or Grok 4.5 (not 4.6, it's too slow).

They're both pretty damn competent and more important, Extremely Fast! I find the speed more useful than trying to be a hundred percent complete on every task. The big intelligent models screw up all the time as well, but I have to wait twenty minutes to three hours to find out.

GPT 5.6 is especially tenacious and seems to want to solve every bug in edge case 1000% all the time. Sometimes that's what you need, but a lot of times you're just trying to move fast and figure out what the product is.

Seems like it wouldn't be hard for Anthropic to tweak a few prompts or RL pipelines to tune for terseness and token-efficiency if that stays as something that consumers want.

I find it unlikely that there's some fundamental property of OpenAI's models' "personality" or style which Anthropic (or any other serious AI firm) wouldn't be able to match if they wanted to.

Claude used to be 10x more efficient. I think there are no barriers of entry between one coding agent and the other. Therefore, I expect them to reverse as soon as people switch. At least this is what I will do.

Oh no, I use the top shelf models every day and I really think they have a lot of room to improve in pretty much every regard. I suspect Fable usage is flatlining because it's not that good comparitively and way too expensive.

There is no evidence regarding distillation. It is impossible to distill a model in just a month which was the gap between fable and Kimi k3. Anthropic wouldn't even keep up with the load. It is just another example of American exceptionalism.

> My money is on the more efficient solution. Even if Anthropic can win some benchmarks by using 3x tokens over 3x time, it is a terrible base to build toward the future. Users are no longer willing to wait exponentially long for linear improvements.

As much as I wish you were right, everything about software economics for the last 30+ years has favored _less efficient software_. Traditional hardware has been optimized for traditional software for decades and we still see bloated software win consistently. LLM hardware is at the start of its cycle, with abundant low-hanging fruit to conquer--I would expect the pro-bloat dynamics to weigh even more heavily in the LLM space than in the traditional software space.

They'll all be getting around to this sooner or later, its just too expensive

also codex + sol is really good and quite fast.

I haven’t had any issues with Fable or Opus code-wise, but the way it has started writing recently has almost become incomprehensible.

At the end of a long session it will start saying stuff like “There are smoke tests on the foundation-gates that are left for the cutting seam checks on these domains, which is genuinely your decision”

Never before the past couple months have I ever not been able to understand wtf it’s even saying lol

Maybe with lower weekly quotas the load will be lower and we'll have fewer outages? A guy can dream.

I had a very similar experience. The combination of Claude going down frequently and the hype around open source models was enough for me to swap my harness from Claude Code to OpenCode. Then it became trivial to test out different models, and now the rest is history. Currently using OpenCode with z.ai and Codex $200/m plans for all my work atm.

You're underselling how good/reliable 5.6 sol is. It's in the fable discussion league not Opus4.8

Yep, switched from CC to 5.6 Sol. Not using it in my day job (only side projects), but I can crank 5.6 Sol on Extra High "fast mode" and never have to worry about credits.

Not doing crazy multi agent swarms, but have yet to hit any limits during pretty intense weekend sessions.

Also try a hundred bucks on Openrouter and experiment with the Chinese models like Deepseek, Kimi, GLM. $100 will last a good while, and it isn't tied to a single model or provider.

I use Claude and Antigravity CLI as an (Arch) Linux desktop system administrator a lot lately. Is Codex useful for that too?

If you aren't using the full $200, you are losing money every month

During this period however they’ve released models which lots of people report to be significantly more chatty. Framing it purely as a promotion ending feels like you’re giving them a bit too much credit. I doubt it’s a coincidence they started this promotion a week before the release of 4.8.

If they remove that extra 50%, I'm moving my $200 to Codex. Good thing we will know tomorrow, just a day before renewal.

"Your subscription will auto renew on Aug 20, 2026."

But I doubt they will remove it, just like they didn't remove Fable from the subscription. There's simply too much competition.

Choco rations going up.

Double plus good, eh!

Seeing how many people with Max accounts on Codex are complaining, your in for a rude awakening. The days that Codex was the undisputed usage king, seem to have been reversed. Its been most most noticed after they did like 20 resets in a month and half, ...

Exactly this. I don't think they are in a position to not extend it.

The link now says it's extended til August 31st.

Flavor of the month LLM gets inundated and swamped with users.

Sideline LLMs have free compute and offer cheap prices to draw in crowd. Becomes flavor of the month LLM.

Back to step one.

It should be pretty clear by now that token prices are predominately a function of available compute.

To be fair, their growth is ridiculously insane. I don't know how else that can be described

They've been really struggling all of 2026. All of these "limited time" promos, just to have less usage than codex, and the shenanigans around "peak hour" reduction earlier in the year.

Their revenue has increased dramatically. The run rate was 9B in Dec, 19B in Mar, 47B in May. It's now at 65B.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/anthropic...

It’s like we’re hot-spotting, but across providers rather than across infrastructure!

Currently (and regularly) down, indeed.

Meanwhile my $100/mo subscription allows me to spank Claude all day doing the work of 4 coders and never hit any limits.

it looks cooked to you, because growth numbers are cooking (to them)

(nobody uses claude anymore, it's too over-subscribed)

For fun/side stuff, handwritten code makes total sense, if you’re burnt out.

For anything that makes money, it feels like a huge step down in productivity, even with the downsides of agent-assisted code.

With how bad Opus 5 and how expensive and limited Fable is, I would not be surprised.

Are there any figure to back up people moving to Codex?

Wasn't that a limited time promotion from OpenRouter? I didn't see anything from OpenAI themselves.

Sure seems like OAI is using their compute/capital advantage to dump. Seems improbable they're making a profit at those levels.

Only API or also sub?

Cursor really is the best deal right now, the amount of usage you get with Grok is amazing and you can use frontier OpenAI or Anthropic models if you ever need to but most code can be written well by Grok.

Not to mention a lot of people who already have more than one max20 sub getting additional ones.

$100 Claude and $100 ChatGPT Pro is the best value for $200/month. They can see each others' mistakes.

I've been using it on a few personal projects and run into the limits quite often. With Sonnet on high, I often hit right about the 5 hr mark when it resets. With Opus, I'll hit sooner.

I'm kind of surprised that you haven't been watching it with /usage to see where you're at. I've had a couple times that it ran out and lost what it was doing and had to start over, so I've gotten more careful.

And the time it burned $100 credit (that they gave us) and the fizzled with multiple agents, leaving me nothing of that work... Well, that was certainly instructive.

Someone here suggested they might keep it forever. Good to see they're considering it. Thanks!

This is true for the next 6 months if that.

The future is models baked into directly into hardware, onto bare metal, serving 10k+ tokens/sec.

We can have our little models, they'll be serving a different customer.

The cost and knowledge required to do that is not viable for the average consumer. Same reason the whole OpenClaw thing imploded.

Does summer holidays only apply to Europeans? I think most Americans are still largely in office for August

On the same day that OpenAI cuts per token cost by 50% on GPT5.6 Sol. :')

i'm using claude right now, like literally in an iterm2 window next to my browser window where I'm typing.

The charge me exactly the same: $100.

gpt-5.6-sol uses fewer tokens and OpenAI has been more generous with usage, but quality-wise I wouldn't say they are inferior to each other.

I have a Claude Code and OpenAI subscription so that I can use Opus/Fable/gpt-5.6 as I please, and the models are often catching things the other models missed. So much that I would significantly weaken my workflow if I dropped one subscription.

My best workflow at the moment is to create the initial plan with Fable (before review/revise-cycling with other models). From my own testing it seems slightly better at arriving at high-level ideal solutions after sweeping the whole project, projecting future needs, then coming up with good trade-offs like "by construction" correctness.

While mostly subjective, maybe the closest objectivity I have here is noticing fewer revision cycles needed with Fable-initialized plans.

This is just the cycle. If the OpenAI offerings are better and cheaper, people will shift there and then those discounts that made it such a deal will evaporate. Anthropic or someone else will entice people back with the discounts.

The whole thing is getting ridiculous.

Sure OpenAI has open source tools, and equivalent or better models, and lower prices, and they get along better with other agentic tools, but Anthropic has much better marketing and I guess that's what matters.

I don't know why this comment's getting down voted. It's absolutely true. I would also add that Anthropic seems to limit, compute, the more you use it because I'm on the Max subscription, and it just stops working for me.

I'll ask it to do something and it'll say, I tried, but I couldn't do it over and over again or some variation of.

But it doesn't do that at the start of my subscription, so...

Same here Fable has been thrash on my 5x Max, it's definitely been quantized, but not through API which is 10-20x as expensive.

So yeah, different people get different quality. I wouldn't be surprised if it calculates a wealth level, willingness to upgrade, influence, usage levels, etc. and decides what models to serve.

It's extremely obvious to me they've nerfed all models on my 5 Max from Fable to even 4.6, but i've tried through enterprise with huge differences in quality, and i've seen other people experiencing this both on reddit and twitter.

It's blowing my mind. Fable is the only AI model I use for coding, everything else is garbage for my use case.

This is ridiculous neither Netscape nor Yahoo made much money (source: I worked at Netscape). Anthropic is one of the largest fastest growing businesses of all time.