- Can 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 and I have only 25% remaining to last me an entire week. This alone is enough for me to switch back to Codex once my current Claude sub ends.
- We should be insulted by this tbh, I'm shifting some of my plans to open AI while this continues, it's just pretty absurd to be jerked around like this. Not to mention the "safeguards" :/. Thank goodness for competition.
- Anthropic keeps on burning people the same way. Destroy the little (if any) trust left... The competitors will eat you alive.
- Question 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 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.
- 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 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.
- I've been chunking out my plans like this for months, and even maintain a port of Get-Shit-Done https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done to the Jujutsu version control system because that was the best way for me to make the most of Opus.
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.
- Personally I apply it every so often to audit codebases but it’s mainly sonnet and Gemini for most tasks. That and a harness for an agent to keep iterating on a goal is perfect. I’m more concerned buy getting hooked on the 50% increase on all models, not just Fable.
- Finally, I can sleep... I'd been working non-stop all weekend to use Fable before it disappeared tomorrow. Now, please, a reset. ;)
- I'm pretty sure you're not the only one. My relief was less about having another week of Fable access, and more "thank goodness I might get a normal night of sleep tonight".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Not using it, because they keep saying they are going either take it away or charge a lot more for it. They seriously screwed up the messaging on this thing.
- So, do you want me to trust technology you will shut down for some reason in random time? No, thanks :)
- Sweet! Safeguards seem a bit over-tuned this morning, it was working on Lenia all night and now it won't touch it.
- Anthropic land: praying for Fable, dreaming of Mythos.
Open AI land: simply using 5.6 Sol Max.
- Keep using Fable. Don't think about using GPT 5.6 Sol
- 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
- I still have no idea if they really want to make Fable usable in a plan in the future or not. They said it's their goal but here they still double down that it will be out of plans, period.
