Developer's detailed take: Opus 5.5 nears Fable 5.1 at lower cost, wins back Claude Code users
dejavucoder · x · 2026-09-26
A long-form model-switching account details why a developer returned to Anthropic: after four months mainly on the Codex app, they found GPT 5.6 Sol great at nearly everything, while Astra was undercooked on eagerness and instruction following (stopping mid-task to ask questions) despite strong writing, frontend, and computer use.
They argue Anthropic had gone through a periodic 'aura loss' — disappointing Opus 5, pricey Fable 5.1 — but Opus 5.5 delivers near-Fable 5.1 performance at a lower price. It feels collaborative and fast, 'eager but not over-eager,' excels at frontend, is decent at computer use/image/video gen, handles frontier coding like inference engineering, and shows less 'neuralese' in writing (knowledge cutoff June 2026). Having mostly quit around Opus 4.7, the author is back on Claude Code thanks to Opus 5.5, while still daily-driving GPT 6 Sol and Astra.
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