Previously, access was set to expire today (July 7th)
It is theorized that OpenAI may time the release of GPT 5.6 in Codex to convert people who have lost access to Fable, so this is an interesting game theoric consequence.
Also consider that Fable launched on June 9. Many people including myself bought a 1-month Anthropic subscription just to use Fable.
By extending it to July 12, they're gonna get a second month out of a lot of such people. If it really expired today, I wasn't going to renew my month.
I immediately downgraded my subscription as soon as they revoked access, then upgraded it again once Fable came back. So they're getting no extra month out of me unless they keep Fable available.
Isn't the plan locked for the month though? I don't see them processing refunds for anyone who starts with Max and downgrades to Pro. Although the converse wouldn't be true: they'd be happy to upgrade a plan at any point.
My theory is they saw capacity would have issues during weekday working hours due to last minute frenzy of usage, so would rather it happen on a weekend if it has to happen.
It's also possible that giving access to Fable when lots of people have been taking time away from working on things (4th July, World Cup, etc) meant they didn't spend much time with it.
Looks like we are at the end of the frontier-level models at subscription pricing. After this grace period, it will be double the cost at paid-per-token usage. I’m counting on the other models to compete at the subscription level and I need my harness to be agnostic. I need an AI harness that lets me switch LLM models dynamically depending on the task.
Rather smart way to keep a bunch of subscriptions subscribed.
I still feel a bit salty I got so much less out of the time I thought I was buying. And I stayed up late asking Fable for what giant leaps and potentials and architectural rewrites might benefit various side projects, so I kind of got what I wanted.
But I'll probably keep one of my pro accounts, for just a bit more usage.
I half expected OpenAI to make GPT 5.6 available today, just to tempt people to switch over. Either way, I'm glad Fable is staying accessible, it's been fun.
Now I'm wondering if the 84% probability of GPT-5.6 release on polymarket on july 9th is about to drop substantially (in order to release while fable is at extra cost, like everyone seems to anticipate)? If they miss thursday release, does it mean they'll release Sol on next tuesday?
The opacity and unpredictability of Anthropic is really starting to become more than just an annoyance. I'm glad they're extending access, but the roller coaster is really starting to cause whiplash.
If they're eventually going to add Fable to the subscription plan, I wish they'd say something about that now, or at least confirm if they don't plan to for awhile. The feeling I get is they don't want to make any announcements because they are flying by the seat of their pants and want to see what their competition does first.
I would pay vastly more, I think it’s incredible value. If I had no other choice I think I’d pay up to $1K per day. The amount of work I’m getting through is absolutely immense.
Same. I don’t know what Mickey Mouse work people are doing that 4.8 is “enough”. CRUD apps maybe?
I have some serious Bayesian statistical research programs running and Fable is on another level than 4.8. It feels like Andrew Gelman is supervising it. Even the vision model on Fable is superior to 4.8 which is great for having it digest research papers.
I read posts like these all the time and I keep wondering when they'll begin to tighten the screws on the prosumers. I think most, if not all, $200/mo individual accounts are blasting high multiples of that amount in tokens. I mean we know that doesn't work with current inference costs, not by a longshot, so I guess this is just a way to pad their numbers like "look, we're growing our user base!" while they can still somewhat hide the "actually, we're hemorrhaging money on inference" in their accounting.
You can't drive prosumers anywhere near API prices. I would guess that the maximum you can extract from vast majority of prosumers is maybe $500/mo, and even that is a big stretch.
Once you cross that threshold, prosumers will simply fall back to using Chinese models and/or self-hosting smaller models, with more efficient and tight workflows.
Sure, but that’s all fine. Maybe McDonalds is just waiting for the day when enough people rely on them that they can charge $1000 for a burger. But if so, the economics aren’t going to work they way they expect.
I’ve always assumed that Anthropic sees the highest token consumers as leading indicators of how developers will use coding agents, so they’re looking at it as training data + market research, and they know that price elasticity is low so trying to charge those developers significantly more would just drive them elsewhere.
Paying $100/month and using Opus 4.8 all the time to get my work done. I had a brief look at fable (when it was available the 1st time) but it burned my allowance to fast. So I keep paying the $100 for Opus and enjoy friction-less uninterrupted work.
I'm usually at 60-70% usage at the end of a 5 hour window, that's the pace where I can still think about what to delegate and what to expect and verify the results. Could probably go faster but that would have a significant impact on output quality.
Very expensive, not sure how it fits in with many companies seemingly trying to get employees using models at about Sonnet tier pricing. I certainly would never pay API rates for it, using ccusage I am seeing myself "use" $150-$400 worth of fable per day. (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tesla-caps-employee-...)
That's funny. Sonnet is not great in my opinion. I mean, it often amazes me with its creativity, and I do prefer its style over most bigger models from other providers.
But it also constantly just does dumb things that make me slap my forehead. Opus is a lot better but the slap ratio has not reached 0 yet. Fable seems a bit better there, more testing needed.
But yeah, VC money ran out, now we wait for Moore's Law... :)
--
Re: Sonnet-ish-pricing. GLM-5.2 is cheaper than that, and appears to be "Opus-ish" in quality. I've been having a reasonably fine time with it. My experience is that it's "very solid for small and medium tasks", haven't tested it for anything bigger though.
I use GLM 5.2 through Opencode Go, but find it to be quite slow when you get to higher contexts (80k+) through their provider so I have not been able to test too much.
For coding Opus 4.8 with ultracode is near perfect and doesn't grind away as many tokens. Fable is advertised as 2x the tokens but in my experience it is closer to 5x what I burn with Opus 4.8.
I only use Fable on things Opus 4.8 would struggle too much with, and as my harness improves that’s less and less. That or they dialed up the intelligence on Opus.
Hmm, so I planned to use all my allowance in 6 hours time (the time they said it would be around until) for the week and then they extend it so that I burned almost all of them in a wasteful way without having the time to review things properly.
I believe these labs really nailed the restrictions on independence for these models. I have seen collegues coding bs with fable 5. Genuinely, the skill issues is feel by the agent and the output is alike
I planned to use all my allowance in 6 hours time (the time they said it would be around until) for the week and then they extend it so that I burned almost all of them in a wasteful way without having the time to review things properly.
This is the second time you posted essentially the same message 40 minutes later, are you stuck in a loop? I wonder if people are looping in addition to their AI agents.
it's incredible how volatile the product and pricing situation is right now. i struggle to find an equivalent industry that has been so all over the place and obtuse
I suspect it's the combination of wanting to capture market share (subsidised plans), being severely capacity limited in GPUs, and having bursty and absurd growth rates. There was speculation that Anthropic might be allocating fewer GPUs to training for a few days to allow people to use Fable.
The actual API pricing seems far more of a stable downward trend, if measuring by equivalent intelligence.
I kind of think they force reset last week. Which actually instead of giving me two weekly cycles of use only gave me a single week of use.
Every single thing about this is fuck users fuck your usage. All those subscriptions I bought to enjoy Fable for the time allotted? Basically gone, didn't get to use the ~4 weeks if cycles or so I had planned for, bought, anticipating. I got two. And now if I want one week more, I need to pay for a full month.
Anthropic is just the most miserable evil grinch. Everything here has totally defied everything that's been laid out for what we were told we'd get and gotten worse and worse, with less and less. Anthropic cannot general an iota of goodwill.
Loosing Fable July 12th and getting usage cut by a third post July 13th is going to be rough. Looks like all the reporting about Anthropic trying their earnest to turn a profit this quarter is true. In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex. Their Pro plan gives you amble usage and only runs close when you are using the fast mode. And even if you run out of credits, they have given users so many credit resets this past month that you can just activate one of those after. I understand Fable is a great model, but switching to API usage will run many people thousands of dollars with the same usage from their subscription plans. Not worth it IMO.
What makes you think your usage is getting cut by 50% post July 13th? It's just that you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable right now, and that is what is going away.
I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.
Subscription is ~$200/month. When I tried running on tokens it was ~$500/day for the same usage pattern.
My guess is my usage is atypically high, but even if the average equivalent is $100-250/day you can get a sense of how much Anthropic is subsidizing subscriptions as a loss leader to lock market share. IMHO this is a doomed strategy since open models will get into a long tail of parity and they’ll ultimately essentially be in the business of commodity compute.
I think you need to consider how much dev mindshare you get from the loss-leader. Claude has grown at an insane rate. They brought vibe-coding mainstream.
At some point they might decide they have enough demand and inertia from enterprise to reduce the subsidy. But to say “it’s doomed” really misses the fact that it has already been immensely successful.
I think it's for the insane amount of data they get to collect. Most people probably don't turn off the "help improve other models" while corporations paying by the token have blanket no-train policies applied to everyone.
We can switch in a heartbeat to a competitor, what kept us to Claude was that it had better models for a while. Closing Fable off means they are squarely inferior now.
For me Opus 4.8 was a slow model with a strong habit of talking down to me in an obnoxious way that would not be possible to prompt away. GPT 5.5 is now my main driver for serious work.
In my experience, all Anthropic models tend to produce hard-to-understand word soup. They're like the kind of person who likes to use fancy words just to show you how much smarter they are.
That doesn't mean those models are stupid or just pretending. I do think that Fable is the best we can get right now. Nevertheless, I prefer OpenAI models for easier tasks where the primary output is text and explanations, not code.
I’m still rattled by all the DoD stuff in the spring. At which point I deleted my ChatGPT/OpenAI account.
But Anthropic’s games with Fable and false humility is getting a bit old. And increasingly it seems like Agent Orange is gonna implode rather than team up with someone like Sam Altman to form America’s Third Reich. Particularly post-midterms.
Nonetheless, wish there was a third option on par with them two. Maybe there is I need to investigate.
Agreed that switching costs to Codex are quite low (not zero due to harness, prompt, and skill differences), but only because OpenAI is running the same loss-leader strategy.
I track the subscription value against API rates and you get between 13-20k at current rates. When Fable launched I got 32k for a short time. 500 USD per day is thus very little.
What makes you think the API costs are "the true price" and anywhere near their inference costs? Also what percentage of users do you think actually maxes out their subscription?
I suspect they're subsidizing a lot less than people think.
We can look at openrouter GLM 5.2 prices I think to get a rough idea about the pure inference cost (with margin). They are probably running on simmilar hardware. Although scale helps Anthropic probably.
Anthropic and OpenAI are really two different businesses in one company.
One business is serving great models via the API. I think that one is indeed going to become commoditized. The other is making consumer / developer focused products like Chat GPT, Claude Code or Codex.
Anthropic is leaning hard into making Claude Code work with things like enterprise compliance policies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of these companies basically ends up as a SaaS fronting many different models for different capability points, some of which are open.
I also compared them against GLM Coding Plan (cause everyone was positive of the model): https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model... and Anthropic still gives you a bit more tokens despite having some of the presumably most expensive to train and run models.
Huh, it's wild that they didn't send an email about this. I can't imagine people taking this well, especially as they don't seem to be giving notice about the end of it either.
> Looks like all the reporting about Anthropic trying their earnest to turn a profit this quarter is true.
That's not how any of this works.
Anthropic is playing the long game; they're not going make a short-sighted decision just so they announce a profit for one quarter, which doesn’t mean much because it won’t be a sustainable profit since they're going to need to spend a ton of money on training and compute over the next few months.
That's why they did a G funding round for $14 billion in February and $65 billion in May.
I suspect one reason for switching Fable to API usage for the near future is they don't have enough compute for their enterprise customers and every hobbyist on their $20/month Pro plan, 80% of which don’t need Fable 5 anyway but that won't stop them from using it as much as they can.
> which doesn’t mean much because it won’t be a sustainable profit since they're going to need to spend a ton of money on training and compute over the next few months.
Never was arguing that it would be a sustained profit, just that they are. Most likely for the reasons you just listed.
> In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex.
IME Codex had a bit of a big head/ego about writing what it thinks I ought to want rather than what I actually ask for, and I've had to spend some time cleaning up its slop.
I've been on Anthropic's subscription product for a few months. I pay annually.
I miss Kagi's multi-model product [1]. Anthropic's nonsense around releasing, deprecating, optimising/lobotomising is tiring, and isn't matched by the value of running different models against each other.
Fable has been fine. But its reliablity is crap. The constant downgrading is crap. This last-minute promotional windowing reeks of JCPenney pre-bankruptcy, not a trusted tool. I hate the Electron app–it's slow and ugly and shows Claude isn't trusted by its own makers with app development. I'm using 4.8 instead of dealing with the pop-ups saying my asking why basil browns is causing my account to be downgraded, and I'm still not sure if that's a nerfed 4.7.
I think it does. I know this is through Microsoft, but they give you a month free of Cowork which is currently Opus 4.8 (or at least they did for us) and I doubt we'd ever go back. When I say "we" it's the enterprise organisation "we", but this also where this sort of spending won't stop anyone. I can't go into exact details, but if our first month had not been free, then our most expensive user would've hit around $1000, while our average (among users who've adopted it and actually use it) is around $100. Neither of those numbers would matter in a budget.
I've had the pleasure of setting up limits because Microsoft needed billing policies before our C-levels have even gotten it on their agenda. So I set up a sort of conservative $200 personal limit, but then setup a $1m shared limit pool that anyone can be moved into with management approval. I suspect our limits will be much higher than this once the C-levels make the decision on an actual company policy. I think we'll see these spending limits mainly used as guardrails to prevent accidental spending, but that there will not really be a ceiling, just some approval gates. Some managers are already requesting usage reports, but not to track spending, they want to see who uses too little AI.
This is the difference between enterprise and small companies and individuals. When you spend $500k a month keeping your toilets stacked with papertowels, toiletpaper, soap etc. then $1m a month on AI isn't going to raise any eyebrows.
Your most expensive users consuming $1,000 dollars a month doesn't matter in the budget? That seems like FOMO activity or something, I feel like even big teams require proof of ROI for an investment like that (1M). BTW, the ROI of toilet paper + soap is pretty easy to prove (you GET to have employees if you provide those two things).
FWIW we are a smaller company and we had a user run through 500$ in a DAY. Had to put a stop to that. I'm hopeful that our company gets better at asking what the ROI is, what is being built, how much time is it taking, etc... It's no big deal when it's 20 / 100$ a month - but if the prices end up higher we will need to start seeing some returns other than "I feel faster".
Man, this "Fable" has been rough. Last week we get access to it again, then they reset usage after a day or two with no warning. Lots of "missed" Fable time because I was pacing it for a reset 5 days down the line. Use up all my Fable time last week, resets Sunday and I don't have enough work projects to burn up the tokens by today, so I burn them on some toy and side projects, which I wouldn't have done if I knew I was going to have it until Sunday. Now I'm at 100% and they give out more access.
It would have been WAY more useful for them to announce the extension, you know, yesterday. This is basically the worst time for them to announce it. Bunch of goobers, who thought this would be a good idea?
I'm spending more time catering to Fable and Anthropic's B.S. than solving problems with Fable. I'm increasingly convinced not getting this deeply baked into single models and going back deep learning on topics of interest is both more fun and useful. (This week: chlorophyll chemistry under heat, also the Sri Lankan civil war.)
Kind of shooting themselves in the foot here. In the process of getting all my Fable use in, I'm also at 68% on overall week limit and 5 days left. So not only am I likely to be using OpenAI much more heavily this week, I'm going to be doing it while being slightly annoyed at Anthropic.
The most frustrating part is that everyone thought the access was ending on the seventh and used it up as much as possible only to have them say oh by the way on the 12th you can it'll go away and so you can keep using it. No one has any more fable usage tokens left? We all used it up they should've also reset people's weekly usage.
Perhaps. I don’t blame them for short horizons given capacity constraints, government mayhem, etc. Promising anything more than a week at a time seems fraught.
Getting on and off fable this week has been quite interesting. For my personal work stream (big terraform monorepo, hundreds of states) I’ve using mostly superpowers to do heavy / quality work. But with fable, I tried just telling it what to do, and it produced roughly the same results without a big structured back and forth that I was accustomed to.
Then after using up all my fable allowance I figured let’s see if opus can actually work without superpowers, and no, it was all over the place doing weird things.
Thing is, superpowers produces meticulous specs and plans as a byproduct of its work, which is very useful for switching between work trees, stoping / resuming work by different people.
But to do that in Fable you have to spend way more tokens than it’s reasonable. You get similar quality result, but without the specs in between.
I’m not super sad that I’ll have to go back to opus though, with superpowers it was Fable but more structured. But I will miss the banter though - Fable is amazing for brainstorming big underspecced features.
This is an interesting comment because it makes me want to ask the question, what is the use for fable then? For me, GPT 5.4 is enough when using recursive-mode. I do appreciate GPT 5.5 Pro for some larger research, architecture, planning tasks though. I think that's what Fable is for. A very small % of total work.
Definitely not just a classifier layered on top, although there is one of those as well. Pretty sure it's different post-training / finetune run and the model weights are different between them. Which is bound to have effects on the model output even in general use, although I'd imagine they have pretty stringent evals to make sure it doesn't regress too much in things they don't want to restrict.
That seems valid in today's world. Right now it's expensive, slow, and accurate. I imagine in the fairly near future it will be cheap, slow, and accurate, and that'll be a great opportunity to let it run on anything time-insensitive.
Re current use-cases: in addition to planning, there's also some tasks which Opus just can't complete but Fable can. Multiple times I've spent hours in combination w/ Opus trying to debug some particularly nasty nondeterministic issue, only to have Fable nail it in 20mins while I walk the dog.
>planning tasks though. I think that's what Fable is for.
this is how i've been using it, and where i've found it really excels over anything else i've tried. get fable to write a plan, and get something cheaper to follow the plan. the code fable writes isn't significantly better than the code opus writes, as long as they're both following the same plan. but a plan written by fable is much better.
What is the use of a genius who does great work but doesn’t document their results, only produces them? How much do companies enjoy having a structural dependency on someone like that?
I think it depends on your workflow. I've had a great experience with the trial. I work in research, and have set up something similar to Kaparthy's auto research. I, with Fable, have managed to get an image generation model down from 80M parameters to 10M and keep the quality of the generated images on par (similar FID). And, importantly, every change was modular, explained by Fable, reviewed by myself, and understood and documented. If not understood, I read relevant docs until I did it didn't accept it as part of the plan. So it ended up being a simple composition of existing ideas which I had previously encountered, but stacked much more rapidly than I could have.
The structure of the code is easily readable as I enforce concenventions followed by good libraries. And I can easily plug in new datasets. It's pretty good frankly.
It's great for feature development. It queries you about you intentions, creates a spec for you to review and modify, creates a plan for it to follow, then farms out the work to subagents.
Crap on it all you want, but it makes LLM work predictable.
It does not make LLM work predictable. Try it on the same type of project twice and see. You think you're saving time but youd accomplish similar results with 2 or 3 skills.
Three years? Vibe coding became a thing roughly 1.5 years ago, around Sonnet 4 release. How would you even compare models from 2-3 years ago to today’s? Is this satire?
That initially looked pretty interesting but a quick peek through issues and folks are complaining that it’s opinionated on git workflows and overriding user instructions otherwise. No thanks.
Edit: a deeper look at the issues and there are many examples of it not behaving as intended. Seems superstitious at best.
Definitely not superstitious.
It's just an opinionated workflow, you can see the steps further down in the repository.
It's just spottily enforced because it's just written to the context in markdown - it's basically one of the very first attempts from the very beginning of Claude code.
But superstitious would mean it's just in your head, essentially - but this has an effect. It does create questionairs, documents every decision and plan etc. Wherever you want that is up to you, I personally didn't... But it's also definitely very much causing an big difference in behavior from Claude Code
I like super powers because I can be more in the loop editing and understanding the plan. Letting fable loose is genuinely impressive, and probably perfect for vibe coding, but I can’t be that far away from the plan and steps for code that matters.
As for being great for vibe coding, it’s cool but I can’t justify that kind of cost for throwaway code. At this point I’ve had good experiences using fable to review code, but I’m totally content with opus for all of my workflows still. If fable was the same price I’d switch (for projects not involving biology, at least), but I’d still use something like super powers to stay in the loop.
This. My workflow is a heavily-modified and personalised superpowers, and the docs that it produces are an asset. I tried Fable and it just ran off and did shit. Mostly that was good shit, but not all, and I would have liked to have had some input to those decisions.
I realise this is just me needing to structure my use of Fable better. But I got to a really nice place with my Opus workflow and I'm reluctant to go through that every time a new model releases.
for the first time, I'm rooting for the chinese to break the american monopoly on AI. although I have gemini, anthropic and openai subscriptions, I just opened an OpenRouter account and will be using more chinese open weights going forward.
IMHE the models work much better if you go directly to the creator's API. DeepSeek V4 official API gives me 8x better caching so it was 40% cheaper in my case. Unless it bothers you China gets your data instead of giving it to the American VC-backed companies.
It also prefer to give my money to the pro-social companies giving away their open models (they cost many millions) instead of opportunists who don't give much back.
Does this affect anybody? It seems they didn't reset your Fable usage so this only applies to people who didn't hit their 50%-of-plan limit with Fable and I can't imagine that's many people given how this thing eats through tokens like that's its job. On Pro I generally could not complete a single plan+execution cycle without hitting my token cap, so that 50% of weekly limit got eaten up fast and I assume that's the typical case.
I suppose it benefits people whose weekly reset is sometime between now and the 12th? Feels like vibe management, because I find this part of the promo more annoying than not.
Well, I don't know how many people it is but I certainly haven't bothered to use it except once or twice. What's the point in getting used to it as a daily driver when it won't be available in perpetuity?
But in any event, you're still right that it won't affect those of us in that camp.
It's still good for code review though. Would've been better were it not for the obnoxious cybersecurity filters that prevent the model from hardening the code.
Lots of people are trying to get the most value out of it before it goes away.
I maximised usage and have reached the limit. I feel like I did 2 week's worth of hobby work over the last few days.
I got Fable to write multiple plans, spent a great part of the weekend reviewing them. Then with superpowers I left must of those plans executing with little intervention over the past few days.
I struggled to get Opus to just keep going without trying to convince me that it's late.
The best project I found to throw it at was cloning llama-server's web UI essentially in one shot. I'm not sure what I'll do with 5 extra days, maybe try to imagine some complex features. I'm no longer surprised at how much seems to work in these "new brain what can it do?" test, and instead think the risk is feeling like I have to take it the rest of the way once I've sunk the token cost :| https://inkcap.click
Yeah, I've been quite skeptical of LLMs, but I was wrong. The new models are capable of generating good quality code reasonably reliably. They still do some dumb things, but it's becoming more capable of one-shotting non-trivial stuff. I've no idea what software development will look like in a decade beyond absolutely nothing whatsoever what it looks like today. Even if we get sublinear progress from now on out, the current SOTA is already enough to redefine coding.
In general I expect the value of software, as a thing in and of itself, to sharply decline. With no barriers to entry, having software that just does something competently will no longer be worth much of anything. It's unclear what that will mean in the bigger picture. It'll also be interesting if this proves correct, given that software companies are largely the ones dumping so much money into this. Another probable outcome is major damage to the support-as-a-service model which again is going to directly affect many of the companies directly enabling this.
I guess the logic is that if you control the systems creating this, you control everything they're used for. But it seems equally obvious that free/local models will catch up to the SOTA today - and eventually tomorrow, so that's not a particularly realistic vision for the future.
I maintain a transit website as a hobby, and I'm building a Flutter app, from scratch. The old pre-COVID one carried mental baggage.
I spent a few weekends building comprehensive plans, designs, user maps, etc with Claude. So it has enough context to make decisions and keep going.
One session lasted over a day, I imagine partly because Fable + superpowers feels slow. I have an app on my phone that I have been test running since Monday on the bus.
What really helps (not sure if Opus used to do this) is that Claude will run through the emulator on its own, verifying that the design aligns with the Figma design system we created.
This is all building on top of 15 years of existing backend and rich features, so it's not a "build me a transit platform from scratch" where AI can end up making bad decisions.
I can honestly say that as a paying customer, I'm getting a bit tired of being jerked around by this company. It's on again, off again. Snip snap snip. And by the way, telling people there's a deadline so they all scramble to use their "Fable allowances" before being cut off, only to then be told "just kidding, here's 5 more days" without getting a usage reset is just another frustrating and disappointing customer experience.
Seriously, all OAI needs to do at this point is just release GPT 5.6, have it be a solid model and then not jerk it out of the hands of their customers, and they're going to eat Anthropic's lunch.
I don't think that exculpates the Trump administration for its arbitrary and capricious use of export controls, an ill-suited legal mechanism, without reasonable process or justification - thereby forcing Anthropic to scramble.
I am using Opis 4.8 xhigh, in OMP.sh coding agent (full agent built on Pi), with Matt Pocock Skills installed.
I don’t see a particular bump in code quality from Fable 5. In fact, it feels less reliable to me than my current setup. No sure why I am not seeing what everybody else is seeing.
Perhaps OMP/Pi (head and shoulders better than Claude Code) + Matt Pocock Skills already encode all the agentic improvements Fable has?
Opus 4.8 xhigh is my daily driver for everything. I'd say Fable's edge is visible when designing for a complex problem with no obvious, idiomatic solutions. It is good at greenfield designs, and good at pointing out the pros and cons of hard design choices. I now do designs with Fable, and do implementations off those designs with Opus. Pretty happy. For a while I was using Fable for everything, but burned through a lot of real money for not much value, I think for coding its slow and not at all better than Opus.
I had the same sentiment. In my limited testing, it didn't perform any better than Opus at all. It wasn't a particularly challenging taskset either, mostly just "add this simple feature" with plenty of context and very clearly defined scope. It worked functionally but there were much better and simpler approaches available. For the cost, I don't see how Fable can ever be worth it.
@anthropic, can you finally add $800-$1000 per month plan and allow us to work instead of tracking your weekly changes and dramas? I think, we (individuals, small-medium biz, first of all) did our best to help you train the model like Fable. Enterprise-level lockdown (and API costs define this) is... unfair? I mean, we all knew that you all will just use us, but it's AI, right? For people, right? Right?
The only reason this is happening -> someone (US gov?) decided that it's time to bail out those who would inevitably die within a year or two otherwise, middlemen.
There is absolutely 0 chance Anthropic or OpenAI will get a government bailout (it might still happen in this admin but it makes no sense). These companies are not like banks which are fundamentally important to the economy. Sure AI is important but Google is not going to die. Why would you save OpenAI and Anthropic when google, amazon or microsoft can just gobble them up when/if needed?
The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM. It might change in the future but for now that is true. This was exactly the reverse with banking, everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow
If you look at it from the perspective of the current US administration, they see that almost all GDP growth in the past year(?) has been related to data center growth. If all of a sudden that industry is gone, you're looking at GDP stagnation or drop that looks terrible for the current party, hence the potential for a bailout.
Personally I hold the opinion that the investment into data centers would shift into something else, so no real GDP drop, but I'm not sure that's a certainty the same as 'bailout keeps the current story going'
Imo the data centers is where things start to get scary. Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t themselves indispensable, but when all of the industries downstream of them taking on more and more debt to supply projected usage in the future I could see the USG forced to bail someone out, if only to shore up their creditors.
That's not a bailout for AI labs, I meant the "bailout" for Salesforce and others. There's absolutely no place for them in the world where we have Fable+ models. For many of them. Most of them (we just didn't get this feeling yet). Someone just trying to maintain the old world order, that's all. I don't think US economy would fail if those absolutely useless giants would go down.
Sure they do. Someone they know is using AI to ask for help with something, which makes their life easier, which makes things easier on them as well, which is a benefit.
Everyone scrambling to max their usage before the deadline may have given Anthropic some valuable data on exactly how much compute they can handle. The extension could also be a play to minimize the effect of OpenAI's next move.
Even if they grant a reset, the ball is now in OpenAI's court.
Why don't they just continue to give you Fable access but have it use quota at 4x or 8x so they at least let people on plans continue to use it, even a little?
I'm already using it judiciously because I tried ultracode with it and it ate my 5h quota while only getting halfway through the problem.
Offtop rant:
This blows my mind. We cared for 30% commission from Apple App Store, PlayStation Store, Steam for things that you buy once and forget for at least 2 years (even when publisher pull their licenses, which happen rarely), but paying 200$/month for 10x of "something" is okay and "basically steal"
Ya, and it works. I now default to Fable-for-the-design, Opus-for-the-build mode, which is sort of cost effective, but I am hooked. Opus does not compare when it comes to architecture, designs and algorithms, esp. for gnarly problems without an obvious compromise-free solution.
Let's be real: Fable 5 on API pricing is so expensive that most solo devs won't be able to use it outside of a pro or max plan. Exceptions might be individuals with highly profitable businesses or mini side projects.
Only inferior, talentless and lower intelligence developers need to rely on LLMs.
Fortunately, you're all going to be jobless when the AI boom fizzles out and it becomes cost prohibitive to use these products once VCs aren't subsidising it. Then us real developers will be laughing.
Anybody else find Fable almost unusable because of the safeguards? I generally can't get more than 2 minutes into a task without it auto-switching back to opus..
Fable may be fine but it tripped itself in the security measure and suddenly went to opus in the middle of a rework of a price index where it was improving the correction of past exchange rate…
And of course now it hides all the thinking process and just spit out the results.This make it a pain to review the proposed change and underlying reasons.
Working for a ling time with that is going to be a nightmare for anyone trying to understand what are the change for and a massive cognitive load.
This is just a series of ploys to make more marketing about fable. They know that if they make it api only nobody is going to talk about it. And knowing that openai will have a comparable model soon means they need to stir up some hype and make people use/talk about it as much as possible. And bluffing that access will be restricted until a specific date is just marketing. Like saying buy in the next 24 hours get one free.
Yep, sounds like the usual time pressure tactics. Perhaps because no one's actually trying it.
In the mean time, their vibe coded frontend doesn't actually let me use Fable because it thinks i'm trying to hack open source software. What I'm actually doing is debugging null pointer crashes due to data corruption in the closed source software i work for these days, but no, you dirty hacker, you can't do that.
So let's recapitulate:
- they put out some marketing copy about Fable being a world ending threat for finding security vulnerabilities
- they get banned by the US government, which believes the marketing copy
- they add "safeguards" and the US government allows them to make it public again
- said safeguards make the product useless for their paying customers
I’ve consciously not used Fable because I want some usage allowance to remain for the rest of the week. The 2x billing is just too aggressive for me when I tried it (max x20 plan user currently).
> Yep, sounds like the usual time pressure tactics. Perhaps because no one's actually trying it.
For your average user, Sonnet is more than enough. Opus will be rarely used. Fable is really something professionals will use and even then with low frequency. The model is really good but the token economics don't make it so appealing to the amount and breadth of people you need to get people talking about Fable the way people talked about Chatgpt in 2022. AI fatigue is here and Anthropic and the like are fighting hopelessly against a rising tide.
I would try it but it goes to opus 4.8 for all we do and so we stopped trying. Our work is not focused on security but obviously, as everything has to, it needs to be audit security. And that will have it change the model.
That's how i feel about it too. But i haven't used it because there's no point in getting used to a new model if it's just gonna get taken away again. I wonder if they're also doing this to get some sort of signal on which types of users everyone is - for example someone else might always be chasing whatever the best model is
Oh don't get me wrong I would try to use the best model available (I don't always max out my usage, and a better model leads to less work from mw hypothetically) even when it can be taken away, I just refuse to feel pressured by them.
Also the rerelease of the time limit over the holiday (july 4) was unfortunate, many Americans go offline for extended weekends (ex i was out almost a week). When i originally saw the fable 5 dates i just shrugged ah well guess i wont test it for a while.
I still haven't been able to use Fable. I'm a medical physicist -- it just balks at anything I do and gives me an AUP / safeguard error. Applies even if I docstrip out all the comments in my C code!
Is it because of the type of work you're trying to get Fable to do or because Fable knows you're a medical physicist? I.e. if your CLAUDE.md says "I'm a medical physicist" but you're asking it to write a command line tool to list github prs or something, does it balk at that?
They give me regular access to Fable, or I'm going to unsubscribe and lobby the heavens for Cohere to release a consumer AI service with a lady's name instead of something like "Claude."
Despite paying for Claude access, I don't use Fable but I find this always changing policy quite exhausting to follow. There is 2x usage, there is no 2x usage, there is 2x usage but only x hours, there is no 2x usage, there is Fable access, there is no Fable access, there is Fable access till x date, there is Fable access till x + y date. This is just exhausting. I just want to open and usage the default model and within limits. That's all I ask.
> I just want to open and usage the default model and within limits. That's all I ask.
Well... doesn't it work just like that, always? Open, prompt, get the result form whatever model your agent extension decides now should be the default one.
It's pretty deceptive. Sonnet only? Seems to have gone. Older models disappear all the time.
This announcement in May about higher usage limits, changes to peak times https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex. Is this even the case anymore? Or has it changed again. The information needs to be baked into the UI.
I set a hard cap of 200k tokens, with Claude's instructions. The app doesn't even respect this.
Someone might say this information is out there but a definitive source is often hard to find, or tell if it's current. I grow a little more and more resentful with sudden unplanned changes like this and want the day of local LLMs so I'm in full control.
I couldn't find a situation where Fable was significantly outperforming Opus enough to make me say wow.
I tried to make it fix a browser game that is sort of like a Mario clone. It couldn't. It fumbled in the same places Opus was struggling too. I tried it with other code as well, but I couldn't get any significant performance improvement out of it, except perhaps in improving my account's token burn.
If anything, in my opinion, GLM 5.2 had a better moment than Fable recently. Not because it is better, but because it was not hyped at all, and many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it.
I am not drawing a direct comparison here, because Fable is clearly the better LLM. But GLM 5.2 is a good, honest model, and I think open-weight models will only get better going forward.
GPT 5.6 is claimed to be at a similar level, or even better than Fable. We will see. They don't seem to hype it as much, and I have not read anywhere that anyone found a soul or consciousness inside it. And if it benchmarks well, I would possibly use it more for this very reason.
It reminds me of that story from Nassim Taleb's Incerto series where if you have two surgeons at practically the same level, but one looks like the typical surgeon and the other looks like a butcher, who are you going to choose? Taleb suggests that the answer should probably be the butcher, because to get to the same level while looking the part so much less, they probably had to be much better than the data shows for.
I cannot also understand the hype online claiming that the Fable transitioning to token-based billing after the gratis period is equivalent of being in the permanent underclass. The only impressive demo that I saw was it writing NES games which kind of looked fun but I couldn't find more details and I am not sure if you can get this done with another model - probably you can but nobody is trying.
So great model but it does not have the same effect as Opus 4.5 and Codex which made me feel that there was a stepping-stone change.
> many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it
That's not realistic. You'd need non-consumer hardware for a frontier open-weights model. And even if you had such hardware for free. Electricity to run it would cost you more than a sub.
When I said "running it yourself" I didn't mean me personally running it at home. That will be unfeasible. A company can afford it though and also a supplier that serves multiple customers can do that as well. In fact, I was talking to a company that does this and the model is fully in UK where we need them to be.
At the end of the day it is about the sense of optionality. We know that this is the business model for almost all open source projects. It is not like you cannot download and run the project yourself and some do for practical reasons, but often times the cloud version is priced such that it is the path of least resistance so people go for that.
I agreed last week but the more I have used Fable this week the more I am getting use to Fable.
I think the Taleb argument is really a stretch for this situation. I consider Taleb one of my greatest teachers but that kind of Talebism I have grown suspicious of in time.
How many surgeons actually look like a butcher lol.
Much of Taleb is like this that it sounds profound as a thought experiment but so much has just nothing to do with reality. A lot of what he is arguing against he is actually doing a form of.
I love Taleb but he is absolutely full of shit. It is marketing and his brand. The proof he is correct are some vague options trades he made 40 years ago.
Fable is better than Opus and I do not think there is much argument there. And yes, it is natural to get used to a new tool and even end up liking it more over time. What I am trying to say is that it does not feel like the step change they are claiming it to be.
I fully agree with your point about Taleb. And yes, it can come across as a bit glib, but the underlying point is not new. Do not judge a book by its cover. That idea exists across many cultures, fables, and stories, so it holds IMHO.
The surgeon example is just an illustration of that idea, and it is a great example because it makes the point memorable. In practice, of course, I agree that most modern surgeons are trained to broadly similar standards and look and act the same, with some outliers and historical exceptions.
After some crying over not getting 5.6 access early and losing Fable and then getting it back, after calmly trying out these models again, I am back to thinking they are over hyped and Anthropic and OpenAI is minting marketing from it.
Prompting Fable is a lot easier sure, like you can actually ask it to build X and it will produce something close-ish to X, but there is hardly anything it can do I couldn't before, and it still fails to do basic stuff and I have to redo it.
Especially this threatening to pull access, extending access, limiting access is all signs that point to the fact that either these companies are deeply mismanaged.
So it's mismanaged because there really isn't a viable product but just hype, as oss models catch up and break down need for these full size models I am feeling more certain that it's not even remotely worth betting on AI.
If there was infinite demand as people posit there would be zero needs to extend this, there would be zero need to market it, they could literally stop all marketting and just keep selling shovels and printing money.
This AI will they won't they saga just leaves a horrendously bad taste for me.
I say that as someone working on the tech, and with a lot of belief in AI technologies. I just get pushed more into the thinking that this is all just a big bubble, sure the tech might be real but it just doesn't make sense how it's being wrapped up and sold/presented.
I strongly believe good products sell despite the marketing, for instance Linux won in servers despite alternatives because of its merits, AI should be able to as well.
Why can't I just enjoy the product and why do I have to look for conspiracies I don't know but these companies sure as hell are doing something very shady.
After all the hype about fable 5, I was expecting more. It's just another incremental improvement in their models, nothing out of the world. Yeah it's more "independent" but that's also a problem because I like that Opus prefers to clarify a lot of stuff before going right to the implementation.
[OP] minimaxir | a day ago
It is theorized that OpenAI may time the release of GPT 5.6 in Codex to convert people who have lost access to Fable, so this is an interesting game theoric consequence.
handfuloflight | a day ago
bathory | a day ago
roncesvalles | a day ago
By extending it to July 12, they're gonna get a second month out of a lot of such people. If it really expired today, I wasn't going to renew my month.
LoganDark | 22 hours ago
skeledrew | 15 hours ago
kiernan | 9 hours ago
onion2k | 12 hours ago
testycool | 23 hours ago
If would've used it more moderately if I had known in advance.
internet2000 | 23 hours ago
dsmurrell | 16 hours ago
They think they're giving you something when they're actually taking something away.
hbarka | 23 hours ago
skeledrew | 15 hours ago
OpenRouter put up something about this a few days ago. Check out their Advisor and Subagent docs.
jauntywundrkind | 23 hours ago
I still feel a bit salty I got so much less out of the time I thought I was buying. And I stayed up late asking Fable for what giant leaps and potentials and architectural rewrites might benefit various side projects, so I kind of got what I wanted.
But I'll probably keep one of my pro accounts, for just a bit more usage.
dicey | 21 hours ago
gorgmah | 23 hours ago
freedomben | 22 hours ago
If they're eventually going to add Fable to the subscription plan, I wish they'd say something about that now, or at least confirm if they don't plan to for awhile. The feeling I get is they don't want to make any announcements because they are flying by the seat of their pants and want to see what their competition does first.
dboreham | 14 hours ago
gck1 | 22 hours ago
I've used fable, it's great. But nothing beats predictability - ever.
This truly feels like some form of emotional abuse/manipulation at this point.
winwang | 22 hours ago
hosel | 21 hours ago
DonsDiscountGas | 18 hours ago
Kim_Bruning | 15 hours ago
cjbgkagh | 15 hours ago
laichzeit0 | 14 hours ago
I have some serious Bayesian statistical research programs running and Fable is on another level than 4.8. It feels like Andrew Gelman is supervising it. Even the vision model on Fable is superior to 4.8 which is great for having it digest research papers.
brookst | 14 hours ago
Culonavirus | 13 hours ago
kuboble | 12 hours ago
gck1 | 10 hours ago
Once you cross that threshold, prosumers will simply fall back to using Chinese models and/or self-hosting smaller models, with more efficient and tight workflows.
You'd be killing your consumer line completely.
brookst | 5 hours ago
I’ve always assumed that Anthropic sees the highest token consumers as leading indicators of how developers will use coding agents, so they’re looking at it as training data + market research, and they know that price elasticity is low so trying to charge those developers significantly more would just drive them elsewhere.
dboreham | 14 hours ago
micw | 13 hours ago
I'm usually at 60-70% usage at the end of a 5 hour window, that's the pace where I can still think about what to delegate and what to expect and verify the results. Could probably go faster but that would have a significant impact on output quality.
Computer0 | 22 hours ago
andai | 21 hours ago
But it also constantly just does dumb things that make me slap my forehead. Opus is a lot better but the slap ratio has not reached 0 yet. Fable seems a bit better there, more testing needed.
But yeah, VC money ran out, now we wait for Moore's Law... :)
--
Re: Sonnet-ish-pricing. GLM-5.2 is cheaper than that, and appears to be "Opus-ish" in quality. I've been having a reasonably fine time with it. My experience is that it's "very solid for small and medium tasks", haven't tested it for anything bigger though.
Computer0 | 20 hours ago
copperx | 16 hours ago
andai | 2 hours ago
If tokens are equal, Fable should only be twice as expensive, but I think it does a lot more work by default.
cromka | 21 hours ago
fearmerchant | 21 hours ago
andai | 21 hours ago
cjbgkagh | 15 hours ago
cyanydeez | 18 hours ago
dsmurrell | 17 hours ago
isaac77 | 16 hours ago
goplayoutside | 16 hours ago
dsmurrell | 16 hours ago
krackers | 15 hours ago
dsmurrell | 15 hours ago
cjbgkagh | 15 hours ago
ValentineC | 15 hours ago
dsmurrell | 15 hours ago
mil22 | 15 hours ago
Corollary: use your quota now because a reset seems likely.
yulker | 15 hours ago
usef- | 14 hours ago
The actual API pricing seems far more of a stable downward trend, if measuring by equivalent intelligence.
scubadude | 14 hours ago
No surprises, it's fundamentally built on promises and lies
GaunterODimm | 15 hours ago
bdelmas | 13 hours ago
alfg | 14 hours ago
jauntywundrkind | 13 hours ago
Every single thing about this is fuck users fuck your usage. All those subscriptions I bought to enjoy Fable for the time allotted? Basically gone, didn't get to use the ~4 weeks if cycles or so I had planned for, bought, anticipating. I got two. And now if I want one week more, I need to pay for a full month.
Anthropic is just the most miserable evil grinch. Everything here has totally defied everything that's been laid out for what we were told we'd get and gotten worse and worse, with less and less. Anthropic cannot general an iota of goodwill.
nickandbro | 15 hours ago
EDIT: corrected usage cut amount
robgough | 15 hours ago
I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.
nickandbro | 15 hours ago
I guess to be more accurate, usage wouldn't get cut 50% but rather by 33.3% post July 13th.
robgough | 8 hours ago
user3939382 | 15 hours ago
My guess is my usage is atypically high, but even if the average equivalent is $100-250/day you can get a sense of how much Anthropic is subsidizing subscriptions as a loss leader to lock market share. IMHO this is a doomed strategy since open models will get into a long tail of parity and they’ll ultimately essentially be in the business of commodity compute.
theptip | 15 hours ago
At some point they might decide they have enough demand and inertia from enterprise to reduce the subsidy. But to say “it’s doomed” really misses the fact that it has already been immensely successful.
verall | 14 hours ago
theptip | 12 hours ago
visarga | 14 hours ago
For me Opus 4.8 was a slow model with a strong habit of talking down to me in an obnoxious way that would not be possible to prompt away. GPT 5.5 is now my main driver for serious work.
yehosef | 14 hours ago
miki123211 | 12 hours ago
That doesn't mean those models are stupid or just pretending. I do think that Fable is the best we can get right now. Nevertheless, I prefer OpenAI models for easier tasks where the primary output is text and explanations, not code.
AbstractH24 | 12 hours ago
But Anthropic’s games with Fable and false humility is getting a bit old. And increasingly it seems like Agent Orange is gonna implode rather than team up with someone like Sam Altman to form America’s Third Reich. Particularly post-midterms.
Nonetheless, wish there was a third option on par with them two. Maybe there is I need to investigate.
theptip | 2 hours ago
oezi | 14 hours ago
andxor | 14 hours ago
I suspect they're subsidizing a lot less than people think.
alwillis | 14 hours ago
Agreed.
edg5000 | 14 hours ago
solumunus | 10 hours ago
rootatixww3 | 8 hours ago
miki123211 | 12 hours ago
One business is serving great models via the API. I think that one is indeed going to become commoditized. The other is making consumer / developer focused products like Chat GPT, Claude Code or Codex.
Anthropic is leaning hard into making Claude Code work with things like enterprise compliance policies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of these companies basically ends up as a SaaS fronting many different models for different capability points, some of which are open.
KronisLV | 11 hours ago
I also compared them against GLM Coding Plan (cause everyone was positive of the model): https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model... and Anthropic still gives you a bit more tokens despite having some of the presumably most expensive to train and run models.
rcfox | 15 hours ago
nickandbro | 14 hours ago
https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054639777685934564
It's not phrased as a usage cut, but rather when their 50% higher limits ends.
EDIT: its 33.3% less usage after July 13th
rcfox | 14 hours ago
notrealyme123 | 10 hours ago
what | 14 hours ago
alwillis | 14 hours ago
That's not how any of this works.
Anthropic is playing the long game; they're not going make a short-sighted decision just so they announce a profit for one quarter, which doesn’t mean much because it won’t be a sustainable profit since they're going to need to spend a ton of money on training and compute over the next few months.
That's why they did a G funding round for $14 billion in February and $65 billion in May.
I suspect one reason for switching Fable to API usage for the near future is they don't have enough compute for their enterprise customers and every hobbyist on their $20/month Pro plan, 80% of which don’t need Fable 5 anyway but that won't stop them from using it as much as they can.
nickandbro | 14 hours ago
Never was arguing that it would be a sustained profit, just that they are. Most likely for the reasons you just listed.
jatora | 12 hours ago
eli_gottlieb | 14 hours ago
IME Codex had a bit of a big head/ego about writing what it thinks I ought to want rather than what I actually ask for, and I've had to spend some time cleaning up its slop.
JumpCrisscross | 15 hours ago
I miss Kagi's multi-model product [1]. Anthropic's nonsense around releasing, deprecating, optimising/lobotomising is tiring, and isn't matched by the value of running different models against each other.
Fable has been fine. But its reliablity is crap. The constant downgrading is crap. This last-minute promotional windowing reeks of JCPenney pre-bankruptcy, not a trusted tool. I hate the Electron app–it's slow and ugly and shows Claude isn't trusted by its own makers with app development. I'm using 4.8 instead of dealing with the pop-ups saying my asking why basil browns is causing my account to be downgraded, and I'm still not sure if that's a nerfed 4.7.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/ultimate-plan.html
throwatdem12311 | 15 hours ago
replwoacause | 14 hours ago
Quothling | 11 hours ago
I've had the pleasure of setting up limits because Microsoft needed billing policies before our C-levels have even gotten it on their agenda. So I set up a sort of conservative $200 personal limit, but then setup a $1m shared limit pool that anyone can be moved into with management approval. I suspect our limits will be much higher than this once the C-levels make the decision on an actual company policy. I think we'll see these spending limits mainly used as guardrails to prevent accidental spending, but that there will not really be a ceiling, just some approval gates. Some managers are already requesting usage reports, but not to track spending, they want to see who uses too little AI.
This is the difference between enterprise and small companies and individuals. When you spend $500k a month keeping your toilets stacked with papertowels, toiletpaper, soap etc. then $1m a month on AI isn't going to raise any eyebrows.
NichoPaolucci | 7 hours ago
FWIW we are a smaller company and we had a user run through 500$ in a DAY. Had to put a stop to that. I'm hopeful that our company gets better at asking what the ROI is, what is being built, how much time is it taking, etc... It's no big deal when it's 20 / 100$ a month - but if the prices end up higher we will need to start seeing some returns other than "I feel faster".
linsomniac | 15 hours ago
It would have been WAY more useful for them to announce the extension, you know, yesterday. This is basically the worst time for them to announce it. Bunch of goobers, who thought this would be a good idea?
JumpCrisscross | 15 hours ago
I'm spending more time catering to Fable and Anthropic's B.S. than solving problems with Fable. I'm increasingly convinced not getting this deeply baked into single models and going back deep learning on topics of interest is both more fun and useful. (This week: chlorophyll chemistry under heat, also the Sri Lankan civil war.)
linsomniac | 15 hours ago
Salgat | 15 hours ago
jofzar | 15 hours ago
fcanesin | 15 hours ago
spyware_suburbs | 15 hours ago
Sevii | 15 hours ago
brookst | 14 hours ago
seer | 14 hours ago
Then after using up all my fable allowance I figured let’s see if opus can actually work without superpowers, and no, it was all over the place doing weird things.
Thing is, superpowers produces meticulous specs and plans as a byproduct of its work, which is very useful for switching between work trees, stoping / resuming work by different people.
But to do that in Fable you have to spend way more tokens than it’s reasonable. You get similar quality result, but without the specs in between.
I’m not super sad that I’ll have to go back to opus though, with superpowers it was Fable but more structured. But I will miss the banter though - Fable is amazing for brainstorming big underspecced features.
try-working | 14 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
Cybersecurity hardening. The one thing they don't allow the model to do.
solumunus | 12 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 12 hours ago
helloplanets | 8 hours ago
adastra22 | 8 hours ago
RSZC | 14 hours ago
That seems valid in today's world. Right now it's expensive, slow, and accurate. I imagine in the fairly near future it will be cheap, slow, and accurate, and that'll be a great opportunity to let it run on anything time-insensitive.
Re current use-cases: in addition to planning, there's also some tasks which Opus just can't complete but Fable can. Multiple times I've spent hours in combination w/ Opus trying to debug some particularly nasty nondeterministic issue, only to have Fable nail it in 20mins while I walk the dog.
notatoad | 13 hours ago
this is how i've been using it, and where i've found it really excels over anything else i've tried. get fable to write a plan, and get something cheaper to follow the plan. the code fable writes isn't significantly better than the code opus writes, as long as they're both following the same plan. but a plan written by fable is much better.
ricksunny | 11 hours ago
ImageXav | 10 hours ago
The structure of the code is easily readable as I enforce concenventions followed by good libraries. And I can easily plug in new datasets. It's pretty good frankly.
chvid | 14 hours ago
ahofmann | 14 hours ago
Culonavirus | 13 hours ago
AndyNemmity | 13 hours ago
steve_adams_86 | 13 hours ago
sixothree | 13 hours ago
Crap on it all you want, but it makes LLM work predictable.
jatora | 12 hours ago
swingboy | 6 hours ago
jatora | 12 hours ago
mvkel | 12 hours ago
ricardobeat | 8 hours ago
appplication | 13 hours ago
Edit: a deeper look at the issues and there are many examples of it not behaving as intended. Seems superstitious at best.
ffsm8 | 12 hours ago
It's just spottily enforced because it's just written to the context in markdown - it's basically one of the very first attempts from the very beginning of Claude code.
But superstitious would mean it's just in your head, essentially - but this has an effect. It does create questionairs, documents every decision and plan etc. Wherever you want that is up to you, I personally didn't... But it's also definitely very much causing an big difference in behavior from Claude Code
smartbit | 12 hours ago
[0] https://primeradiant.com/blog/2026/superpowers-6.html
steve_adams_86 | 13 hours ago
As for being great for vibe coding, it’s cool but I can’t justify that kind of cost for throwaway code. At this point I’ve had good experiences using fable to review code, but I’m totally content with opus for all of my workflows still. If fable was the same price I’d switch (for projects not involving biology, at least), but I’d still use something like super powers to stay in the loop.
marcus_holmes | 12 hours ago
I realise this is just me needing to structure my use of Fable better. But I got to a really nice place with my Opus workflow and I'm reluctant to go through that every time a new model releases.
jnaina | 14 hours ago
bdelmas | 13 hours ago
alecco | 11 hours ago
It also prefer to give my money to the pro-social companies giving away their open models (they cost many millions) instead of opportunists who don't give much back.
kelnos | 14 hours ago
"First hit is free", indeed.
nh43215rgb | 14 hours ago
somenameforme | 14 hours ago
I suppose it benefits people whose weekly reset is sometime between now and the 12th? Feels like vibe management, because I find this part of the promo more annoying than not.
phinnaeus | 14 hours ago
Well, I don't know how many people it is but I certainly haven't bothered to use it except once or twice. What's the point in getting used to it as a daily driver when it won't be available in perpetuity?
But in any event, you're still right that it won't affect those of us in that camp.
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
Lots of people are trying to get the most value out of it before it goes away.
bdelmas | 13 hours ago
nevi-me | 13 hours ago
I got Fable to write multiple plans, spent a great part of the weekend reviewing them. Then with superpowers I left must of those plans executing with little intervention over the past few days.
I struggled to get Opus to just keep going without trying to convince me that it's late.
donw | 13 hours ago
jakswa | 12 hours ago
somenameforme | 12 hours ago
In general I expect the value of software, as a thing in and of itself, to sharply decline. With no barriers to entry, having software that just does something competently will no longer be worth much of anything. It's unclear what that will mean in the bigger picture. It'll also be interesting if this proves correct, given that software companies are largely the ones dumping so much money into this. Another probable outcome is major damage to the support-as-a-service model which again is going to directly affect many of the companies directly enabling this.
I guess the logic is that if you control the systems creating this, you control everything they're used for. But it seems equally obvious that free/local models will catch up to the SOTA today - and eventually tomorrow, so that's not a particularly realistic vision for the future.
nevi-me | 12 hours ago
I spent a few weekends building comprehensive plans, designs, user maps, etc with Claude. So it has enough context to make decisions and keep going.
One session lasted over a day, I imagine partly because Fable + superpowers feels slow. I have an app on my phone that I have been test running since Monday on the bus.
What really helps (not sure if Opus used to do this) is that Claude will run through the emulator on its own, verifying that the design aligns with the Figma design system we created.
This is all building on top of 15 years of existing backend and rich features, so it's not a "build me a transit platform from scratch" where AI can end up making bad decisions.
randsorex | 7 hours ago
-- 50% of this forum
Retr0id | 13 hours ago
isodev | 13 hours ago
The Max plan at 180€/month excl VAT already comes up for budget review every time. Not sure any sort of increase will be tolerated at all.
alfg | 13 hours ago
somenameforme | 9 hours ago
replwoacause | 14 hours ago
Seriously, all OAI needs to do at this point is just release GPT 5.6, have it be a solid model and then not jerk it out of the hands of their customers, and they're going to eat Anthropic's lunch.
mil22 | 14 hours ago
jaykru | 14 hours ago
mil22 | 14 hours ago
nullbio | 8 hours ago
mil22 | an hour ago
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
nadermx | 14 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
nullbio | 8 hours ago
g42gregory | 14 hours ago
I don’t see a particular bump in code quality from Fable 5. In fact, it feels less reliable to me than my current setup. No sure why I am not seeing what everybody else is seeing.
Perhaps OMP/Pi (head and shoulders better than Claude Code) + Matt Pocock Skills already encode all the agentic improvements Fable has?
aenis | 12 hours ago
mavamaarten | 10 hours ago
leobuskin | 14 hours ago
The only reason this is happening -> someone (US gov?) decided that it's time to bail out those who would inevitably die within a year or two otherwise, middlemen.
psyclobe | 14 hours ago
sroussey | 13 hours ago
0123456789ABCDE | 12 hours ago
xienze | 10 hours ago
AuthAuth | 14 hours ago
altmanaltman | 13 hours ago
The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM. It might change in the future but for now that is true. This was exactly the reverse with banking, everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow
pfannkuchen | 13 hours ago
Sure, but only because banks are legally allowed to lie to customers about how much money they have.
shaewest | 13 hours ago
Personally I hold the opinion that the investment into data centers would shift into something else, so no real GDP drop, but I'm not sure that's a certainty the same as 'bailout keeps the current story going'
janalsncm | 13 hours ago
leobuskin | 13 hours ago
fragmede | 8 hours ago
Sure they do. Someone they know is using AI to ask for help with something, which makes their life easier, which makes things easier on them as well, which is a benefit.
bbor | 13 hours ago
winterbourne | 13 hours ago
Even if they grant a reset, the ball is now in OpenAI's court.
ozozozd | 13 hours ago
Is it so amazing? Or is it the “intermittent reward” and exclusivity driving people to use it?
nullbio | 8 hours ago
sunaookami | 5 hours ago
nullbio | 3 hours ago
noworriesnate | an hour ago
yieldcrv | 13 hours ago
gwd | 13 hours ago
rootatixww3 | 8 hours ago
zeafoamrun | 13 hours ago
I'm already using it judiciously because I tried ultracode with it and it ate my 5h quota while only getting halfway through the problem.
pkaye | 13 hours ago
Khaine | 12 hours ago
charcircuit | 12 hours ago
baq | 9 hours ago
GRiMe2D | 8 hours ago
baq | 7 hours ago
aenis | 12 hours ago
asasidh | 12 hours ago
morgengold | 12 hours ago
zjsjns | 11 hours ago
Fortunately, you're all going to be jobless when the AI boom fizzles out and it becomes cost prohibitive to use these products once VCs aren't subsidising it. Then us real developers will be laughing.
theplumber | 11 hours ago
ngsevers | 11 hours ago
pyrex | 11 hours ago
nottorp | 9 hours ago
And for the record i'm NOT vibe coding it...
matltc | 4 hours ago
Cider9986 | 11 hours ago
"For summer, you're becoming a big boy so we've made the decision to increase your allowance."
You are an adult, why are you using a service that treats you like a child?
tmountain | 9 hours ago
mahkeiro | 10 hours ago
alex7o | 10 hours ago
nottorp | 10 hours ago
In the mean time, their vibe coded frontend doesn't actually let me use Fable because it thinks i'm trying to hack open source software. What I'm actually doing is debugging null pointer crashes due to data corruption in the closed source software i work for these days, but no, you dirty hacker, you can't do that.
So let's recapitulate:
- they put out some marketing copy about Fable being a world ending threat for finding security vulnerabilities
- they get banned by the US government, which believes the marketing copy
- they add "safeguards" and the US government allows them to make it public again
- said safeguards make the product useless for their paying customers
greengreengrass | 9 hours ago
bossyTeacher | 9 hours ago
For your average user, Sonnet is more than enough. Opus will be rarely used. Fable is really something professionals will use and even then with low frequency. The model is really good but the token economics don't make it so appealing to the amount and breadth of people you need to get people talking about Fable the way people talked about Chatgpt in 2022. AI fatigue is here and Anthropic and the like are fighting hopelessly against a rising tide.
alex7o | 8 hours ago
nottorp | 8 hours ago
But then I'm not vibe coding so my token usage is ridiculously small...
zaphirplane | 2 hours ago
No that’s the other myth ( some variants of spelling) one
anonzzzies | 32 minutes ago
sagarpatil | 10 hours ago
nullbio | 9 hours ago
subarctic | 4 hours ago
alex7o | 4 hours ago
cloverich | an hour ago
outdig | 40 minutes ago
azalemeth | 10 hours ago
noworriesnate | 2 hours ago
k9294 | 10 hours ago
It looks like Anthropic baiting people into Max subscriptions before turning the model off. No thank you.
ocd | 10 hours ago
nullbio | 9 hours ago
artemonster | 9 hours ago
cromka | 8 hours ago
nullbio | 3 hours ago
8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 6 hours ago
I'm planning to subscribe to OpenAI after exhausting weekly usage with Fable. Good timing with GPT new models and might as well take a look at Codex.
While skills can be copy pasted, I'm not sure if the hooks are transferable.
thisisit | 8 hours ago
jve | 7 hours ago
Well... doesn't it work just like that, always? Open, prompt, get the result form whatever model your agent extension decides now should be the default one.
CommanderData | 6 hours ago
This announcement in May about higher usage limits, changes to peak times https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex. Is this even the case anymore? Or has it changed again. The information needs to be baked into the UI.
I set a hard cap of 200k tokens, with Claude's instructions. The app doesn't even respect this.
Someone might say this information is out there but a definitive source is often hard to find, or tell if it's current. I grow a little more and more resentful with sudden unplanned changes like this and want the day of local LLMs so I'm in full control.
outdig | 40 minutes ago
_pdp_ | 8 hours ago
I tried to make it fix a browser game that is sort of like a Mario clone. It couldn't. It fumbled in the same places Opus was struggling too. I tried it with other code as well, but I couldn't get any significant performance improvement out of it, except perhaps in improving my account's token burn.
If anything, in my opinion, GLM 5.2 had a better moment than Fable recently. Not because it is better, but because it was not hyped at all, and many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it.
I am not drawing a direct comparison here, because Fable is clearly the better LLM. But GLM 5.2 is a good, honest model, and I think open-weight models will only get better going forward.
GPT 5.6 is claimed to be at a similar level, or even better than Fable. We will see. They don't seem to hype it as much, and I have not read anywhere that anyone found a soul or consciousness inside it. And if it benchmarks well, I would possibly use it more for this very reason.
It reminds me of that story from Nassim Taleb's Incerto series where if you have two surgeons at practically the same level, but one looks like the typical surgeon and the other looks like a butcher, who are you going to choose? Taleb suggests that the answer should probably be the butcher, because to get to the same level while looking the part so much less, they probably had to be much better than the data shows for.
I cannot also understand the hype online claiming that the Fable transitioning to token-based billing after the gratis period is equivalent of being in the permanent underclass. The only impressive demo that I saw was it writing NES games which kind of looked fun but I couldn't find more details and I am not sure if you can get this done with another model - probably you can but nobody is trying.
So great model but it does not have the same effect as Opus 4.5 and Codex which made me feel that there was a stepping-stone change.
GLM 5.2 had that moment though.
scotty79 | 8 hours ago
That's not realistic. You'd need non-consumer hardware for a frontier open-weights model. And even if you had such hardware for free. Electricity to run it would cost you more than a sub.
_pdp_ | 8 hours ago
At the end of the day it is about the sense of optionality. We know that this is the business model for almost all open source projects. It is not like you cannot download and run the project yourself and some do for practical reasons, but often times the cloud version is priced such that it is the path of least resistance so people go for that.
randsorex | 7 hours ago
I think the Taleb argument is really a stretch for this situation. I consider Taleb one of my greatest teachers but that kind of Talebism I have grown suspicious of in time.
How many surgeons actually look like a butcher lol.
Much of Taleb is like this that it sounds profound as a thought experiment but so much has just nothing to do with reality. A lot of what he is arguing against he is actually doing a form of.
I love Taleb but he is absolutely full of shit. It is marketing and his brand. The proof he is correct are some vague options trades he made 40 years ago.
_pdp_ | 7 hours ago
I fully agree with your point about Taleb. And yes, it can come across as a bit glib, but the underlying point is not new. Do not judge a book by its cover. That idea exists across many cultures, fables, and stories, so it holds IMHO.
The surgeon example is just an illustration of that idea, and it is a great example because it makes the point memorable. In practice, of course, I agree that most modern surgeons are trained to broadly similar standards and look and act the same, with some outliers and historical exceptions.
minraws | 7 hours ago
Prompting Fable is a lot easier sure, like you can actually ask it to build X and it will produce something close-ish to X, but there is hardly anything it can do I couldn't before, and it still fails to do basic stuff and I have to redo it.
Especially this threatening to pull access, extending access, limiting access is all signs that point to the fact that either these companies are deeply mismanaged.
So it's mismanaged because there really isn't a viable product but just hype, as oss models catch up and break down need for these full size models I am feeling more certain that it's not even remotely worth betting on AI.
If there was infinite demand as people posit there would be zero needs to extend this, there would be zero need to market it, they could literally stop all marketting and just keep selling shovels and printing money.
This AI will they won't they saga just leaves a horrendously bad taste for me.
I say that as someone working on the tech, and with a lot of belief in AI technologies. I just get pushed more into the thinking that this is all just a big bubble, sure the tech might be real but it just doesn't make sense how it's being wrapped up and sold/presented.
I strongly believe good products sell despite the marketing, for instance Linux won in servers despite alternatives because of its merits, AI should be able to as well.
Why can't I just enjoy the product and why do I have to look for conspiracies I don't know but these companies sure as hell are doing something very shady.
kelvinjps10 | 4 hours ago
deepsquirrelnet | 2 hours ago
So generous.