Fable extended until 19 July

Deeply unserious company, flip flopping on policy every week with ludicrous, sometimes invisible, guard rails on their top model. Imagine trying to make business decisions about AI use with this.

I love Fable for many things including coding but I cannot justify basing any internal AI tools or LLM powered products on top of Anthropic's offerings.

I've been trying Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol last few days. My impression is that Sol consumes a lot less tokens that Fable 5 being comparable. Gpt 5.6 Sol can be run sustainably on one 20x plan. Fable 5 requires 2-3 20x plans to be run sustainably. I think the best move move for Anthropic would be to release an Opus 5 that is actually as cheap as Sol and comparably good. They have released a Fable 5 and Sonnet 5 so that seems like a possible move but I'm not sure whether the Opus 5 they got is already at Sol level. Claude Code terminal is still better than Codex CLI though as an harness. Claude code Ultramode + workflow is unmatched by Codex harness yet in my experience.

For 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 creature that is Fable more than I otherwise might. I don't know if that was Anthropic's plan, but if it was it worked on me at least.

But there's a limit to how many times they can play this card. Eventually either Fable has to blow me away so much that it justifies the API spend (it hasn't yet), or I have to decide that I can't rely on it, and I develop an approach that leans on it less heavily.

I don't know when we hit the tipping point from scarcity increasing perceived value to uncertainty reducing real value, but it can't be that far away.

idk dude but at my use case fable is not even better than opus 4.8 on xhigh

so gone or not I dont think I miss a shit

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 complications that need to be overcome that need to be escalated. Then there are patterns that can be picked up in large migrations and fed into template repos or tooling.

I won't use Fable for everything, but if there is ground to be broken on a new concept, being able to build a prototype with Fable might be useful.

I also have some substantive migration tasks such as replacing a static front end with solidjs or moving from NLL to Polonius that I would like to use Fable for.

It certainly feels like over the last fortnight it has enabled a substantial amount of transformative change in my codebases.