Can't agree more. Feels like LLMs are not able to understand your requirements at a high level and always add complexity by default. Really need a handbook to guide them to do those cleanups. Obviously they know the knowledge in their weights but they just don't know how to apply it.
Cranking up the reasoning effort seems be a trend recently and to me it looks desperate, like cranking up the wattage of a processor when you can’t get other, better gains.
Like yeah, you made it perform better, but I could’ve set any other model to xhigh and spent all the tokens and patience.
It’s surely enough to generate buzz for some headlines about “Fable-level performance”, but I would’ve expected people “in the know” to push back at this more.
I run fable at max for basically any non-trivial task. Not even for the result of that task, I get so many “I noticed in passing” bullets at the end that have led to productive refactors and caught bugs it’s worth the tokens by itself. Obvious caveats, depends on your language, framework, codebase, prompt… I also have a “no gardening” rule that tells Claude not to bundle unrelated changes or refactors and it really respects it.
Just to add before someone objects, but the tokens! I have only once maxed out a 5x subscription week (which I then upgraded and maxed out a 20x week so it was a big push). I don’t understand how some people are using so many tokens
