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 cre…
Fable extended until 19 July
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#22Question 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 :) )
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#23Question 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 :) )
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…
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 of the plan like this has the added benefit of being able to swap for a different model when the time comes (looking forward to Opus-level models I can run on my consumer card...)
Not really convinced using Fable and trusting the harness to orchestrate for you is worth the intelligence upgrade. An understanding of an high level implementation plan of your task is also necessary when working with colleagues who rightfully quiz you. Especially since, at least for my work, there isn't a lot that Opus struggles with.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#24Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#25Earlier 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…
I don't need that with Fable. I can give Fable a task of any complexity and it will spend over 8 hours in a single turn if it needs to. And then the task will be finished.
For example, Fable is far better at helping me keep that port updated with upstream's agentic pace of development. With Opus I would be spending all day working through each merge step by step. With Fable I can safely nap through it.
I don't know exactly how to communicate that difference other than that Fable just seems to make better decisions more consistently and more reliably to the point where I feel confident trusting it a lot more.
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#26Finally, I can sleep... I'd been working non-stop all weekend to use Fable before it disappeared tomorrow. Now, please, a reset. ;)
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#27Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#28Question 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 :) )
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#29I 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 will just rug pull me or string me along in another way and constantly be threatening to change things. I have other stuff to think about, the last thing I want is my tool provider constantly changing their mind on things, making me waste mental energy on -p or fable access.
I don't really want to but it would be so much easier to just go with codex right now...
Re: Fable extended until 19 July
#30Question 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 :) )
There are some bugs that just seem to elude Opus and GPT 5.5. An example is an Elixir/LiveView app that I wrote for personal use that basically gives me a full tmux in my browser from the system it's running on (very useful for VMs or when on-the-go on mobile and need to run a quick command or two). On mobile the scrolling is complex and janky and even Fable struggled to figure it out, even with me spoon feeding direction.
> what did you do 6 months ago when SOTA models were as intelligent as today's B team?
The bugs didn't get fixed. I tried, oh did I try. New bugs (worse than the one fix) introduced, other things breaking, etc. I just lived with the bugs or fixed them myself.