It's not weird, because it's an anecdote, not an accepted fact.
Personally I've not been too happy with Opus 5, but I've had similar experiences with other models previously, feeling like they didn't quite fit with my working style.
So nothing indicates we've hit a peak.
4.6 was best for us and right now yeah OpenAI and others are edging forward, but slower while prices are increasing industry wide as much as 20x, time to completion is increasing wildly and i'm sure they'll do the same over at OpenAI as their compute constraints also start to take a toll ie degrade performance.
In my view 4.6 era was way faster and with less weirdness so we've gone downwards at least in my company, 4.7 was ridiculous, then 4.8 was almost 4.6 level, 5 is even worse than 4.7 - so it's not a bit up and down its down then a little up then further down.
And all of this is against a backdrop of zero ROI in this sector - so it makes sense we've hit a peak and we're now seeing the subsidisation phase begin to falter, will there be better models certainly but only for short amounts before they get quantised (or whatever is happening behind the scenes), and with diminishing returns over huge prices increases and slower responses.
Opus 5 is arguably a regression but GPT 5.6 is pretty strong evidence that we haven't hit a peak. I think I actually prefer Sol to Fable at this point.
I too got fed up with the prose of Opus in particular, and tried going back. Unfortunately, the previous models were less able to hack it. The prose was better but progress was worse.
It wasn't just conversation and comments. Some of the function names were wild. Like it instead of something like "isSolidWall(x)" it would write something like "weightyNotEphemeral(x)" or something - that's not quite it, but it really did embed overwrought antithesis into the identifier instead of a straightforward positive predicate.
edit: oh you mean month? Sure, but then it fully depends on your usecase. I agree that subscriptions are heavily subsidized though.
I presume something is forthcoming, but it may be they don’t want to come empty handed—-5.1 is intended to “fix the glitch.”
I’ve instead moved to GLM, at least it has the courtesy to ask some steps of the way what I wanted exactly and only work on what I asked.
Sol and Fable are great; we haven't hit a peak, Anthropic just tried to pull a fast one on its customers with Opus 5.0.
At that point I decided it's just not worth the babysitting that's required, and you are better off working entirely with other models.
If the harness itself was open source then maybe we'd be able to wrap it up in a reasonable layer of sanity.