Stop looking at fable max. On medium it's a bit better than Sol at $3.80. High and xhigh sit in between. In general you can ignore Max reasoning on Claude models if you care about price at all
replyMax and xhigh reasoning modes are memes used for benchmarking usually. Medium and high cost $3.80 and $9.08 respectively. This is pretty comparable to other models.
reply6.1 sol is also an exceptionally cheap model in your comparision. On 6.1 sol high is $0.59, which is actually the same price as Deepseek 4.1.
Medium usually sucks. Xhigh is not a meme. High and xhigh are the efforts you should actually use.
replyIts not possible to generalize this way. The proper level of effort depends on the task, the size of the code, how much context is easily available versus deeply hidden, how novel the ask is versus formulaic, etc, etc.
replyMedium usually gets the job done quickly and correctly for me. I use high when a request is out of the ordinary and has some tricks to consider. I haven't seen better results going higher.
replyThat's for coding at least. For creating images (SVG, 3D models, etc), medium does usually suck, and every level above improves it.
IME medium will not investigate your codebase enough, and will assume incorrect stuff, or not consider things that do need consideration.
replyProbably the bigger the codebase, the more problematic it is.
Depends on what you do. Medium is really good for implementing yet another feature in my code, really.
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reply> Fable 5.2 is not 21 times better than GPT 6.1 Sol, I find it hard to justify this.
replyHow is this relevant? I'm willing to pay 21x more as long as the cost is less than my value of time saved
Most other competitive models will do the task at 90-105% of the performance, for 50% of the cost, and 1/3 the time.
replyAI generally underperforms human, so is "raw quality" is the only metric you would not use an AI. Time-to-completion-at-quality is usually pretty important and Fable is not good there.
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replyI think there are companies and say 1000s (not 100,000 or millions) of developers more than willing to pay that price for the edge. Or, they release this and then distill it to Opus 5.x. As a PR machine and for the edge use cases seems like its okay. But yes, not sustainable and it can last for a month or so before another company releases their frontier outpacing their numbers
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