NEW AI Model Tier List for Vibe Coding!

Opus 4.8 is the safest ship-to-prod coder right now because Fable 5 is effectively gone.

## The S-tier: Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 Fable 5 lands in S+ ("if there's a tier above that, all right, that's where Fable 5 is at"). It produced a working, visually clean Pine Script indicator on first try — the first model to do so. The US government paused it after Pliny's jailbreak turned it into a "Mythos class" cyber weapon. The creator's take: "assume that they're not just generalist anymore... they are the closest thing to AGI." He hands every Fable 5 repo to Opus 4.8, which "is still the safest bet" for SaaS dashboards, client projects, and "anything with real users."

## A-tier: the workhorses GPT 5.5, Quint 3.7 Max, GLM 5.2, MiniMax M3, Kimmi-2.6, and Sonnet 4.6. GPT 5.5 is great in plan mode but "tends to overthink... spend more tokens than necessary" and drifts without /goal or /loop. Quint 3.7 Max nailed a polished 3D Chinese roof when others left scaffolding. GLM 5.2 dropped the same day as the video and is "significantly cheaper than Claude" with strong vision. MiniMax M3 is a "huge improvement" over 2.7, especially in a Claude Code harness running three parallel instances. Kimmi-2.6 beats the newer 2.7 code in flexibility. Sonnet 4.6 gives you "80% of Opus 4.8's code quality at a much lower price."

## B-tier: pick a job, not a default Qwen-3.7 plus, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.3. Gemini 3.1 Pro is already "lagging behind" and "over-engineer[s] simple projects" — a landing page prompt returns a microservices diagram.

## C-tier: situational or unreachable Xiaomi MiMO V2.5 Pro only shines on Chinese-language prompts and Xiaomi IoT work. Deep Seed V4 Flash is a cheap plan-mode partner. Gemma 4 runs locally but needs heavy hand-holding. News Spark has no public API.