I considered Opus 4.5 to be the peak for a while. Opus 4.6 tended to over think, and generally get lost in thinking. I asked something and Claude Code would just spin for 15 minutes. And it was not the harness, if I changed the model to 4.5, it was fine again. So I skipped the following releases. I've been working with Opus 4.8 the last weeks and while I don't like how talkative it is, but it is fine to work with interactively. I've also used Fable for the few days it was available, and indeed, that was model worth using for my use case. To the point, but still very interactive.