It is a vastly superior model for complex, real-world coding tasks. I've constantly had Opus 5 hit road blocks where it spins in circles at xhigh, where switching to Fable immediately solves it. I've had Opus create solutions that Fable then points out the gaps and limitations with, and have never seen the opposite happen.
The fantasy that Opus is superior for coding, much less the incredibly weird clutching onto some far obsolete model, is not reality based.
Are there any non-real-world coding tasks? I never wrote code for a novel or a TV series. If the non-real-world coding tasks exist, it’s gotta be a tiny market.
If what they mean by that is “not implementing data structures in the CS curriculum,” to imply it’s more advanced coding, it sort of gives away the shallowness of their software expertise. Those _non-real-world_ constructs hide far more complexity, and the patterns they rest on can be applied neatly to many domains - not to mention they are often borrowed from other domains like operations research, logistics, biology, physics, math etc.
When people talk about "real-world" in this context, the contrast is to artificial situations contrived as tests (e.g. benchmarks). This is blatantly clear to anyone actually engaging their brain.
Opus 5 does very well at the coding LLM benchmarks. In some cases even better than Fable 5.x. Yet in practice, in loads of real world situations where I've applied it against coding problems, it is vastly inferior to Fable.
The fantasy that Opus is superior for coding, much less the incredibly weird clutching onto some far obsolete model, is not reality based.