I've been making an auction site and have been using an AI swarm to test it: sellers, intermediaries, buyers, market practices/norms etc. I was mostly using GPT 5.5 xhigh to code up the scenario, and looping over it to check with opus 4.8. Out of curiosity I asked Fable to review it all and I was shocked to find that there were a lot of blindingly obvious common sense mistakes that got through, for example: - all int…
Maybe you are something special by letting those slip through in the first place?..
This conversation is about capabilities of Fable 5 vs. older models, not about the GP's abilities.
I'll mirror some other anecdata here: Not finding Fable to be amazingly godlike at actual coding, but it does seem better at planning, architectural thinking, and reviewing code. Used it to think through some longer form refactors that involve some product decisions and changes, and found it to provide more thoughtful feedback. However that's just my subjective experience, and I don't think it's provably that much be…
My experience as well. I quickly stopped trusting Opus to build foundational abstractions because it would almost never to them well and instead would end up chasing into rabbit holes and building overly complex and ugly solutions. I think Fable is an entirely different experience. It has much better taste , and is better at balancing features versus complexity to a point where I currently trust it to make novel desi…
Personally I think the verdict is still out on if Opus & co are actually worse, or the rate at which we move with these tools now is faster than we're used to for managing tech debt and compounding complexity with rapidly built software.
If nothing else, using the smart model for planning to hand off to the previous gen for implementation still seems like a useful pattern.
I use both Opus and Fable on tasks that are well beyond "things that would take a human 3 hours" It fails all the time - as in it ends up doing something I want to change. But this doesn't actually matter - if it takes 3 or 4 iterations on something that would have taken me a week it might be a day of human work, but it's still 5 times better than doing it by hand.
This seems like the obvious correct frame of mind with which to approach these tools. If it works for three hours on a task that would have taken me three work weeks, and 20% of the time it gets the task wrong, then I can just ask it to do it again with adjusted instructions. It will be much more likely to get it right the same time, and I’m still ahead of where I would have been by 14 days and 2 hours.
Or in two words, managing variance.
Play some holdem folks and keep track of how many times you lost with pocket aces.
Fable is a lot like Opus at its best. It's simply more reliable and feels a bit smarter. For my use cases, using it feels very nice , and notably better than Opus. It needs less direct guidance to get reasonable looking code and I don't have to watch it as closely. For context, my Claude Code working style is quite heavy on discussion "to align" before implementing anything. We also use a good amount of Markdowns. Oh…
I've had Fable add Chinese characters to our conversation for no reason.
Could it be that Anthropic is using the Chinese characters trick to consume less tokens behind the scenes?
I don't understand how some of y'all use these things. I get garbage unless I give them very specific concrete tasks with as much context as possible. Anything that takes more than 30 min is usually a waste because the scope was too large.
This is my fucking life at work right now. I look forward to the weekends. I've never been truly inconvenienced by shitty devs because they're often too lazy to really spam me with bad code, but now they are all free to do so. I spent so much time today writing guardrail markdown files when these people SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABLE TO REVIEW THE OUTPUT AND KNOW THAT IT WAS BAD. It truly is the age of the 90 IQ software engi…
As if meetings weren't bad enough already, I now have to sit through an informal introduction to the model of the week and its personality characteristics and how quickly it burnt through one subscription's token allotment or whatever and the latest tweaks on the magic markdown files. Luckily I've only had a couple changes sent my way so far, which weren't much different than just getting a bug report to debug and fix myself. I will need to get into risky options gambling or something so I can go start my farm early, if it keeps going this way. Even supposing it all works correctly, I don't see how it is in any way enjoyable, satisfying, or fulfilling.
Sorry to tell you friend, but LLMs have touched the vast majority of active codebases out there, whether you like it or not. You can tell yourself that you’re one of “the folks that matter” (lol) all you want, but we’re never going back.
That's what people told Ignaz Semmelweis, too, I assume. "Nothing you can do, the powers that be decided, you are a minority, you don't matter, lol!" Snickering in the shadow of what they won't confront at those who do.
Well, perhaps we will be sent similarly to asylums for "anti-AI psychosis"
I have no idea how people are burning $2k. I pay $100/mo and it's built an absolute crap ton of stuff for me. And my co-founder uses it 24/7 as well. Maybe we spend too much time actually reading the code (risk or benefit? you decide). Or maybe I'm in the "massively subsidized" camp and the investors are about to go for our jugular. But $2k for a single project is several orders of magnitude more than I am currently paying.
I have no idea how people are burning $2k. I pay $100/mo and it's built an absolute crap ton of stuff for me. And my co-founder uses it 24/7 as well. Maybe we spend too much time actually reading the code (risk or benefit? you decide). Or maybe I'm in the "massively subsidized" camp and the investors are about to go for our jugular. But $2k for a single project is several orders of magnitude more than I am currently…
Isn't this just a "I'm paying for a sub vs. others are paying for tokens" situation?
I have no idea how people are burning $2k. I pay $100/mo and it's built an absolute crap ton of stuff for me. And my co-founder uses it 24/7 as well. Maybe we spend too much time actually reading the code (risk or benefit? you decide). Or maybe I'm in the "massively subsidized" camp and the investors are about to go for our jugular. But $2k for a single project is several orders of magnitude more than I am currently…
You're in the massively subsidized camp. They're going to move Fable off of the subscription tiers to API-only. $10 per million tokens in and $50 per million tokens will get expensive quickly; considering it burns through thousands of tokens thinking itself in circles with no way to follow along.
I have no idea how people are burning $2k. I pay $100/mo and it's built an absolute crap ton of stuff for me. And my co-founder uses it 24/7 as well. Maybe we spend too much time actually reading the code (risk or benefit? you decide). Or maybe I'm in the "massively subsidized" camp and the investors are about to go for our jugular. But $2k for a single project is several orders of magnitude more than I am currently…
You're in the massively subsidized camp. They're going to move Fable off of the subscription tiers to API-only. $10 per million tokens in and $50 per million tokens will get expensive quickly; considering it burns through thousands of tokens thinking itself in circles with no way to follow along.
> They're going to move Fable off of the subscription tiers to API-only.