what is Anthropic going to do on July 19 though? Drop Fable and watch their users flock over to gpt5.6? I don't see it happening.
this is the third extension already. they will keep extending and then keep it available for Max.
Fable extended until 19 July
41–50 of 55 posts
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#42Question to HN: How many of you actually need the SOTA level intelligence of Sol and Fable? What kind of tasks do you use it for, and what did you do 6 months ago when SOTA models were as intelligent as today's B team? The other day I tried a 31B model from a Canadian company and felt this is good enough for 80-90% of my tasks. (For the cuorious: North Mini Code. Free on OpenCode/Zen right now. No affiliation :) )
For ordinary coding (making webapps, frontend and backend), the non-SOTA models do fine, but the SOTA models have better judgement and need me to intervene less often, allowing workflows like "Go and pitch me a solution to this problem, then go build it". 6 months ago, I would give lower-level tasks and read more of the code myself. So I don't "need" the SOTA models, but they do help considerably. And I am also worki…
Subagents are a godsend. Frontier models for initial planning and spec writing, cheaper models for implementing from the spec, frontier models for review. Frontier models to help with research. The availability of cheaper models is great, since it gives more price points for different tasks.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#43Can Anthropic please just decide on what their plan is with Fable instead of kicking the can down the road last-second every time and consequently destroying all notions of being able to plan out one's weekly usage expenditure?
Just cancel and switch to OpenAI. That's what I'm going to do. My current Max subscription runs out in like 20 days. That's the time they have to get their shit together and make their flagship model actually usable on a subscription without some stupid "safety" classifier downgrading to Opus every other turn.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#44For whatever reason I've preferred, at least so far, Fable to 5.6. I've spent the time since Fable's return being very cautious about when and how I use it, whereas with 5.6 (especially given OpenAI's generous limit resets) I'm pretty liberal about using it for lots of things that in the long run I could do with a less capable model. Psychologically, I think that approach has made me value the delicate, ephemeral cre…
The second a product appears too scarce or expensive for sustained use, I steer away from it. I don't need to become attached to things I can't rely on. Fable gobbles up tokens at a completely unreasonable rate anyway so it's basically useless. The other day it chewed through my 5 hour session window for all models in about an hour. Leaves a pretty sour taste in your mouth.
They actually increased Fable's resource consumption after last week's usage reset. A 5h window with fable would use 5% of my weekly quota before the reset, and it suddenly started consuming 10% weekly immediately after. Just a final insult after weeks of jerking people around. Finally motivated me to cancel.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#45This is truly vindication for my efforts to get off of frontier models and harnesses as much as possible. I won't deny the model is _pretty good_ but it is not worth all of this whiplash.
I really envy you. There is a clear divide amongst my colleagues now in terms of who is using Fable and who isn't (this is math work, so it is well and truly better than all the other models). Everyone is quickly becoming reliant on this, and with Anthropic constantly changing their mind, it's just miserable.
You might be interested to learn I am primarily doing proofs & formal methods.
I have a couple of novel formalizations using some bolt-on programs I wrote for Claude Code, but I am mainly using it now to build my eval dataset for my custom inferencing and compute.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#46PLEASE MAKE UP YOUR MIND. I have claude, codex, cursor and kiro, all most basic teir and swap around. I like anthropic the best. I would have upgraded to Claude Max 20x by now (and dropped the others) if you would just incldue an amount of fable in the subscription. I would have done it on the first of this month if I'd know fable would be included until the 19th. However I'm not sure I want to at all as I feel you w…
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Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sort of thing Fable and Sol excel at are long horizon tasks. The sort of thing I have been using them for is migrating large numbers of repositories to new tooling simultaneously (adopting new linters, enabling dependabot automerge, rolling out mutation testing). Some of that can be done mechanically or trivially, and Fable knows to write a script or deploy Sonnet for those instances, but other times there are co…
For my needs, Opus does these kind of "long horizon tasks" well enough already, with additional tooling. As long as you are chunking out the tasks generated from the plan, you can manually (or write an orchestrator to...) give the component tasks to agents that pass along inputs and outputs per the dependency graph derived from the plan. You can write this plan yourself or review it with the agent. Chunking tasks out…
For normal building work I use Opus to plan and GPT 5.6 Terra to build. The point is, these are not normal constrained building tasks.
Perhaps I should have had more faith in Opus's ability to complete tasks like these, but it just hasn't been my experience to date. Opus and 5.5 work great within constrained user story type tasks, but I just don't have confidence in them to complete a large unbounded task like: "find out why the shared dependabot automerge component isn't working on this one repo, then formulate a strategy to roll it out across these 90 other repos, ensuring that Python, Rust, Typescript, go, sensible, and GitHub actions are all correctly updated. Address any CI failures, codex and codescene review comments in your PRs, then merge on green."
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#48Can Anthropic please just decide on what their plan is with Fable instead of kicking the can down the road last-second every time and consequently destroying all notions of being able to plan out one's weekly usage expenditure?
Oh gosh, that would be so nice. The triple whammy of (a) two layers of annoying timed usage windows, (b) constantly changing model availability windows, and (c) random unpredictable usage resets, is absolutely brutal for anyone who is trying to plan methodically and be efficient. One minute I'm trying to use an entire week's worth of quota in less than 24 hours, then moments later I read the deadline has been punted…
> One minute I'm trying to use an entire week's worth of quota in less than 24 hours, then moments later I read the deadline has been punted and I have only 25% remaining to last me an entire week.
tbf anthropic reset the usage quotas with every fable promotion "extension" in the past weeks. I was also worried about having <25% of usage quotas for the rest of the week because i was trying to squeeze every token out of the fable promotion but then usage limits were reset meaning i could use almost double the tokens my plan would allow.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh gosh, that would be so nice. The triple whammy of (a) two layers of annoying timed usage windows, (b) constantly changing model availability windows, and (c) random unpredictable usage resets, is absolutely brutal for anyone who is trying to plan methodically and be efficient. One minute I'm trying to use an entire week's worth of quota in less than 24 hours, then moments later I read the deadline has been punted…
> One minute I'm trying to use an entire week's worth of quota in less than 24 hours, then moments later I read the deadline has been punted and I have only 25% remaining to last me an entire week. tbf anthropic reset the usage quotas with every fable promotion "extension" in the past weeks. I was also worried about having <25% of usage quotas for the rest of the week because i was trying to squeeze every token out o…
Hopefully the same will happen this time but there’s no announcement and it’s uncertain and unpredictable, which is less than ideal. Personally I am using all my quota before Monday morning Pacific time anyway, hoping they will do a reset when the team is back in the office. If I’ve bet incorrectly, I will
have wasted my 25% by using it all in one day, in a rush and therefore inefficiently, rather than being able to take my time and plan it out. That’s what irks me the most.
In fact I’d say the entire system of weekly quotas and resets seems quite poorly designed. A constant rate continuous recharging model would work much better, like a battery. No arbitrary usage period phasing, no waiting for 5:45am on Sunday morning for your quota to reset. There would be no worrying about how your specific reset time aligns with the additional random resets or model availability. That would be a much better user experience and would cost them nothing.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#50Can Anthropic please just decide on what their plan is with Fable instead of kicking the can down the road last-second every time and consequently destroying all notions of being able to plan out one's weekly usage expenditure?
I thought Anthropic's plan with Fable was "we detected you doing something we don't like but we won't tell you what, falling back to Opus 4.8". I think the name Fable is quite appropriate for a model that doesn't actually seem to exist.