I'm late to the thread, but my experience with Claude Fable 5.1 has been absolutely horrendous.
Things it does constantly that Fable 5 barely ever did:
- Act without my permission. All. The. Time. "Oh I just finished this thing we were discussing, let me push it without ever having been told to do so."
- Immediately jump to action instead of addressing me first. If I say "I wanted to write tests for this and run them" it immediately starts writing tests instead of digging into what "this" is better -- literally does not give me any feedback and starts spitting out code. Naturally it creates the wrong tests
- Despite claims that it does not write like "stereotypical Claude" anymore, in my experiments it is far worse than before. Replies are longer, more filled with fluff, and still flooded with garbage language. Hard to parse.
- It loves to answer my set of two direct Yes/No questions with 5 paragraphs where it only answers one of them and answers 4 other questions I didn't ask. Notice how it misses one of the questions.
- It. Is. Cocky. Absurdly full of itself and arrogant. Just the whole way it presents and answers passes this energy of "No, but really, you're wrong and I'm right". It often is not right. What annoys me is not that it's wrong more often than before (which it may be), it's that it doesn't own up to it as before. Insulting if it were a human.
- Replies and addresses me directly in its thinking traces, and then assumes I've read it. I ask a question, it answers it in the thinking traces and does not relay it back to me at all. This is the only one that Fable 5 also did, but 5.1 is doing it an order of magnitude more often.
- It's too early to really tell, because I may just be working on particularly harder problems today, but it seems to get things wrong more often. I've had to bump it from high to xhigh to compensate.
My guess is I must be having a bad day or something. Although this is happening on multiple projects run from multiple machines (fully isolated, except for the account, which is the same) all in the same way.
Things it does constantly that Fable 5 barely ever did:
- Act without my permission. All. The. Time. "Oh I just finished this thing we were discussing, let me push it without ever having been told to do so."
- Immediately jump to action instead of addressing me first. If I say "I wanted to write tests for this and run them" it immediately starts writing tests instead of digging into what "this" is better -- literally does not give me any feedback and starts spitting out code. Naturally it creates the wrong tests
- Despite claims that it does not write like "stereotypical Claude" anymore, in my experiments it is far worse than before. Replies are longer, more filled with fluff, and still flooded with garbage language. Hard to parse.
- It loves to answer my set of two direct Yes/No questions with 5 paragraphs where it only answers one of them and answers 4 other questions I didn't ask. Notice how it misses one of the questions.
- It. Is. Cocky. Absurdly full of itself and arrogant. Just the whole way it presents and answers passes this energy of "No, but really, you're wrong and I'm right". It often is not right. What annoys me is not that it's wrong more often than before (which it may be), it's that it doesn't own up to it as before. Insulting if it were a human.
- Replies and addresses me directly in its thinking traces, and then assumes I've read it. I ask a question, it answers it in the thinking traces and does not relay it back to me at all. This is the only one that Fable 5 also did, but 5.1 is doing it an order of magnitude more often.
- It's too early to really tell, because I may just be working on particularly harder problems today, but it seems to get things wrong more often. I've had to bump it from high to xhigh to compensate.
My guess is I must be having a bad day or something. Although this is happening on multiple projects run from multiple machines (fully isolated, except for the account, which is the same) all in the same way.
Will probably downgrade to 5 while I can.