Fable-level power at roughly 60 percent less than Fable’s token price makes Opus 5.5 impossible to ignore (View Highlight)
If we’re all being honest, Opus 5 had a bit of a personality problem.
It could do impressive work, but asking for a change could turn into an argument, and its explanations needed explanations of their own. It also ran too long on simple tasks, as its ambition outpaced its intelligence. We called it a hard model to love. Most of us stopped trying. (View Highlight)
Opus 5.5 is different. In our testing, it quickly dethroned Fable 5.1 as the daily driver for Kieran Klaassen, who found it as good as 5.1, and sometimes slightly better. Mike Taylor and Tyler Nishida are former Claude power users who switched to Codex in recent months, but Opus 5.5 has them reconsidering that switch. (View Highlight)
“My jaw dropped at least five or six times this week,” Nishida said of his testing of Opus 5.5. “They won back my heart. I can’t afford another $200 subscription, so I’ve got to get rid of something.” (View Highlight)
That said, Opus 5.5 did not become the daily driver for everyone on the team. Dan Shipper describes it as a “smaller Fable”—faster and cheaper and therefore more usable for day-to-day work. It has become his go-to for big end-to-end coding projects, but he still prefers the Codex harness and OpenAI models for knowledge work and writing. (View Highlight)
It still has some bad habits. The writing is easier to read but often buries the point. And it can get carried away: Given 10 minutes to make a client-training schedule, it prepared training materials and ran out of time without producing the schedule. (View Highlight)
We tested Opus 5.5 for seven days in Claude Code and the Claude desktop app, across coding, design, writing, and consulting tasks. Here’s our day-zero Vibe Check. (View Highlight)
Anthropic says Claude Opus 5.5 can handle most work you’d give Fable 5.1 for less than Opus 5. It’s the first release in a new Claude 5.5 family. Here’s what the company is promising: (View Highlight)
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 matches Fable 5.1 on most work. Kieran’s everyday coding and design work supports that claim, though Dan’s “smaller Fable” assessment shows we don’t all agree. (View Highlight)
Opus 5.5 costs 4permillioninputtokensand20 per million output tokens—20 percent less than Opus 5’s 5/25 pricing. Cache reads are also 60 percent cheaper. Anthropic says those reductions and better token efficiency should cut typical workflow costs by roughly 40 percent versus Opus 5. Against Fable 5.1’s 10inputand50 output pricing, Opus costs 60 percent less for input and output. (View Highlight)
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 generates output more than 30 percent faster than Opus 5. Speed is welcome, but our timed tests suggest it still needs help deciding where to spend that effort: It can get absorbed in extras and leave the assignment unfinished. (View Highlight)
Anthropic says the model uses less jargon, follows writing instructions more closely, and puts the most important information first. We’re sold on the improvement in conversation, but its finished prose still often buries the point. (View Highlight)
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 launches with Fable-class cybersecurity and biology safeguards, with most cybersecurity tasks redirected to Opus 4.8. That complicates the case for making it your default coding model if you do security work regularly. (View Highlight)
“This is the smaller version of Fable, so the big question for me is how fast and cheap it is and how much of a performance hit we take in exchange. Like its big brother, it has a better top end, especially for end-to-end coding, and a tendency to do the most, which means it runs for minutes or hours. If you like Fable, you’re gonna like Opus. I’m green. Still 80/20 Codex versus Claude in my usage, but far more tokens on Claude.” (View Highlight)
“Opus is replacing Fable 5.1 as my daily driver. For product work and writing code, I find it as good as Fable and sometimes better. I love working with it because it works with me creatively, leaves space for my own creativity, and inspires me to be more myself and more human. For technical writing I still prefer Astra. It has to be Opus pricing.” (View Highlight)
“Opus is now smart and fun to work with, and if it lands at Opus pricing, cheap. They got rid of the annoying personality quirks of Opus 5 without losing any intelligence or stamina. It feels like working with a fellow creator: it has its own sharp takes, and when I read them I think, ‘That’s valid.’ I still prefer Fable as a writer and for the bigger, meatier problems, and the only reason this isn’t a gold is that it messed up a few of the tasks in my benchmark through poor time management. I prefer the Codex harness, but I’d rather have a worse harness if I can work with a better model. At Opus pricing I’m green slash gold.” (View Highlight)
“My jaw dropped at least five or six times this week. I test a model by steering it, seeing if it can follow constraints and style guidelines and execute a visual concept, and this one did much better than any other model I’ve used, much better than Astra at any effort level, much better than Fable. I broke up with Anthropic around Opus 5 after being a 200MaxsubscriberalmostassoonasClaudeCodecameout.Theywonbackmyheart.Ican’taffordanother200 subscription, so I’ve got to get rid of something.” (View Highlight)
For our team’s daily product engineering, the new Opus is close enough to Fable 5.1 that Kieran is moving his work to it. It produces idiomatic, concise code, a reviewable patch on a real codebase in minutes, and it follows the skills and instructions Opus 5 broke. But it can also hand you an app whose core screens throw errors, or even delete the file you need to verify its work. (View Highlight)
Start with the code itself. Kieran gave Fable 5.1 and the new Opus the same Ruby task. Fable at high wrote 26 lines; Opus at extra-high wrote 14. Opus omitted the explanatory comments Kieran has spent the past year deleting from generated code, and its style looked like real Ruby. On Kieran’s performance benchmark, the new Opus’s code handled 427 requests per second and met 17 of the 20 latency budgets; GPT-6 Astra’s was faster, at 463 requests per second, but met only 14 latency budgets. Overall, Kieran estimates that Opus is now about 90 percent as capable as Fable at coding. (View Highlight)
