3 ms·

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work. I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work. I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a … I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.

tcp_handshaker 1mo ago
You have a $3 trillion bubble riding on this not being true.
- jamiek88 1mo ago
  Right? If we’ve already reached ‘good enough’ then there’s rough waters ahead.
  - Yizahi 1mo ago
    I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google may be making the same bet, looking at the faster and faster Flash models which provide acceptable results to a lot of people (outside of coding).
  - deadbabe 1mo ago
    For Anthropic. But not for the AI industry at large. Cheaper, more powerful AI will continue to expand the bubble. Projects will get more ambitious. Everyone will build out their own custom little software. Code diversity expands and requires even more AI.
    - byzantinegene 1mo ago
      most of the bubble right now is fueled from circular financing of Anthropic and OpenAI
      - deadbabe 1mo ago
        It’s not “circular financing”, it’s cooperation between companies.
- porridgeraisin 1mo ago
  The bubble is _not_ on models becoming more intelligent and solving arc-agi-999. They are already good enough at what they mechanically are. You have to use the right harness, right verifiers (automatic where possible, human where not), etc much much more specific than a generic one like claude code or codex, and it will also be able to work within constraints and be the "proposer" of an imaginary optimisation problem and an excellent one at that. But you have to frame the task at hand in that manner or maybe even reorganise the task you do itself so it is more amenable to being framed that way. If you use it this way, it is _already_ massively economically useful. But it will take many years for it to actually be usable in that way, since you need DC capacity to come up first which is few years away and also well, massive organisations that have to integrate these will usually take many years to do so. It is also useful albeit less so in cases like general SWE, where you still need a human in a loop for non-verifiable requirements, and also in other general usecases where information retrieval is too intractable and you need to carefully use LLMs as a component of the overall system. I am not saying Fable or whatever the biggest models are are useless - they will certainly be useful for tasks at the frontier of the day - which is today complex exploits and open math problems, and well, tomorrow it could be something in biotech. But this is not what the entire bet is on at all - just automating day to day drudge at the tens of thousands of massive companies and governments we all know and love is more than enough. With the right training data (which _also_ is a bottleneck and takes time) you could even automate certain processes entirely. Sure, if we get a crazy medical innovation and end up saving trillions in healthcare great, but that's just a bonus. None of this is to say that I think there is zero sketchy financial engineering going on
  - krupan 1mo ago
    The bubble is based on the promise that these LLMs will cure cancer and find the solution to global warming. The pragmatic users of these tools (like you seem to be) are enjoying the subsidized use of the tools right now, but it's not a sustainable business model
    - fluidcruft 1mo ago
      Are you sure the bubble isn't riding on the idea that satisfying the electricity demands will bring fusion to the world?
WinstonSmith84 1mo ago
I wish Fable were as good as you make it sound. A plan created by Fable is good, but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again (whether by itself, Opus, Sol etc.). That's (almost) not different from plans created by Sol, GLM 5.3 etc. The one thing where it's genuinely better is the front-end, but then again it's far from perfect, it just needs less iterations.
- enraged_camel 1mo ago
  >> but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again Yes but those issues will be much less severe with Fable-written plans than those written by lesser models. I know this because my workflows at both my regular job and my startup involve multi-step agent reviews via codified adversarial review skills. Fable as a reviewer will frequently find blocker-level issues with plans written by GPT 5.6 Sol, and sometimes with Opus 5. The opposite almost never happens. In fact I cannot remember the last time it happened.
- dwaltrip 1mo ago
  Fable does far better at considering the whole picture, weighing options, and making suggestions during architecture or refactoring discussions. It’s more reliable and makes less dumb errors than Opus. It still messes up, of course. But for my working style, I definitely prefer it.
  - mapontosevenths 1mo ago
    Exactly. Use Fable to draft the plan and make decisions. Less capable models to implement the plan. That said, Opus 5 is broken. Use 4.8 or another vendor for the build agent.
throwaway63467 1mo ago
It works much better on regular software development e.g. for complex refactoring where cheaper models would produce a lot of garbage results.
bentt 1mo ago
Yeah this is a fair point. I only go to it when I have some big architectural problem I want its help in working out. Or a super nasty bug.
vatsachak 1mo ago
I hate to be brusque but this is cope. GPT 5.6 Sol is just as good and cheaper
- nullbio 1mo ago
  1000% cope.
rowanG077 1mo ago
I think highly complex work and “professional” work are basically completely orthogonal. You can have highly complex work you do as an amateur, where AI can be very useful. For example working through a difficult mathematical problem, building or contributing to an operating systems, or researching a highly technical topic for a hobby project such as microscopy, chip design or lithography. And you can have extremely simple work that you nevertheless have to do as a professional. For example, drafting a routine customer email, summarizing a meeting, formatting a report, filling in standard documentation, or making a trivial code change. So I don't think the $15k workstation / professional camera analogy really holds. Those are specialized tools whose capabilities are mostly useful within a fairly narrow domain. A general-purpose AI can be useful across thousands of completely unrelated tasks, including one-off problems encountered by ordinary people.
Bender 1mo ago
Would I, a non developer be able to utilize or benefit from Fable? I have been using Sonnet to update and make changes to a piece of open source software that was basically abandoned. It found and fixed a handful of security issues. I am curious if I am missing out on anything. If I change from Sonnet to Fable mid-stream will I lose any history? The one challenge I have run into is turn-by-turn session history. Claude complains about memory constraints. It constantly has to go back and re-learn what it did in our sessions a week or two ago. It accidentally deleted many of its own files so I convinced it to store everything in a .claude sub-directory in my fork of the other persons code so that I can keep it backed up when the claude sandbox has issues. Claude seems to want to talk me out of changing models which I found odd. I'm just doing this as a hobby for fun and adding features to a program I use. I am trying to make the most of the boost they gave me for August. My account is max pro. (5x more than pro). I am also trying to make the most of this thing in the event that these business models do not pan out.

tcp_handshaker 1mo ago

You have a $3 trillion bubble riding on this not being true.

jamiek88 1mo ago
Right? If we’ve already reached ‘good enough’ then there’s rough waters ahead.
- Yizahi 1mo ago
  I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google may be making the same bet, looking at the faster and faster Flash models which provide acceptable results to a lot of people (outside of coding).
- deadbabe 1mo ago
  For Anthropic. But not for the AI industry at large. Cheaper, more powerful AI will continue to expand the bubble. Projects will get more ambitious. Everyone will build out their own custom little software. Code diversity expands and requires even more AI.
  - byzantinegene 1mo ago
    most of the bubble right now is fueled from circular financing of Anthropic and OpenAI
    - deadbabe 1mo ago
      It’s not “circular financing”, it’s cooperation between companies.
porridgeraisin 1mo ago
The bubble is _not_ on models becoming more intelligent and solving arc-agi-999. They are already good enough at what they mechanically are. You have to use the right harness, right verifiers (automatic where possible, human where not), etc much much more specific than a generic one like claude code or codex, and it will also be able to work within constraints and be the "proposer" of an imaginary optimisation problem and an excellent one at that. But you have to frame the task at hand in that manner or maybe even reorganise the task you do itself so it is more amenable to being framed that way. If you use it this way, it is _already_ massively economically useful. But it will take many years for it to actually be usable in that way, since you need DC capacity to come up first which is few years away and also well, massive organisations that have to integrate these will usually take many years to do so. It is also useful albeit less so in cases like general SWE, where you still need a human in a loop for non-verifiable requirements, and also in other general usecases where information retrieval is too intractable and you need to carefully use LLMs as a component of the overall system. I am not saying Fable or whatever the biggest models are are useless - they will certainly be useful for tasks at the frontier of the day - which is today complex exploits and open math problems, and well, tomorrow it could be something in biotech. But this is not what the entire bet is on at all - just automating day to day drudge at the tens of thousands of massive companies and governments we all know and love is more than enough. With the right training data (which _also_ is a bottleneck and takes time) you could even automate certain processes entirely. Sure, if we get a crazy medical innovation and end up saving trillions in healthcare great, but that's just a bonus. None of this is to say that I think there is zero sketchy financial engineering going on
- krupan 1mo ago
  The bubble is based on the promise that these LLMs will cure cancer and find the solution to global warming. The pragmatic users of these tools (like you seem to be) are enjoying the subsidized use of the tools right now, but it's not a sustainable business model
  - fluidcruft 1mo ago
    Are you sure the bubble isn't riding on the idea that satisfying the electricity demands will bring fusion to the world?

WinstonSmith84 1mo ago

I wish Fable were as good as you make it sound. A plan created by Fable is good, but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again (whether by itself, Opus, Sol etc.). That's (almost) not different from plans created by Sol, GLM 5.3 etc. The one thing where it's genuinely better is the front-end, but then again it's far from perfect, it just needs less iterations.

enraged_camel 1mo ago
>> but in my case, it always contain issues caught only when it's reviewed again Yes but those issues will be much less severe with Fable-written plans than those written by lesser models. I know this because my workflows at both my regular job and my startup involve multi-step agent reviews via codified adversarial review skills. Fable as a reviewer will frequently find blocker-level issues with plans written by GPT 5.6 Sol, and sometimes with Opus 5. The opposite almost never happens. In fact I cannot remember the last time it happened.
dwaltrip 1mo ago
Fable does far better at considering the whole picture, weighing options, and making suggestions during architecture or refactoring discussions. It’s more reliable and makes less dumb errors than Opus. It still messes up, of course. But for my working style, I definitely prefer it.
- mapontosevenths 1mo ago
  Exactly. Use Fable to draft the plan and make decisions. Less capable models to implement the plan. That said, Opus 5 is broken. Use 4.8 or another vendor for the build agent.

throwaway63467 1mo ago

It works much better on regular software development e.g. for complex refactoring where cheaper models would produce a lot of garbage results.

bentt 1mo ago

Yeah this is a fair point. I only go to it when I have some big architectural problem I want its help in working out. Or a super nasty bug.

vatsachak 1mo ago

I hate to be brusque but this is cope. GPT 5.6 Sol is just as good and cheaper

nullbio 1mo ago
1000% cope.

rowanG077 1mo ago

I think highly complex work and “professional” work are basically completely orthogonal. You can have highly complex work you do as an amateur, where AI can be very useful. For example working through a difficult mathematical problem, building or contributing to an operating systems, or researching a highly technical topic for a hobby project such as microscopy, chip design or lithography. And you can have extremely simple work that you nevertheless have to do as a professional. For example, drafting a routine customer email, summarizing a meeting, formatting a report, filling in standard documentation, or making a trivial code change. So I don't think the $15k workstation / professional camera analogy really holds. Those are specialized tools whose capabilities are mostly useful within a fairly narrow domain. A general-purpose AI can be useful across thousands of completely unrelated tasks, including one-off problems encountered by ordinary people.

Bender 1mo ago

Would I, a non developer be able to utilize or benefit from Fable? I have been using Sonnet to update and make changes to a piece of open source software that was basically abandoned. It found and fixed a handful of security issues. I am curious if I am missing out on anything. If I change from Sonnet to Fable mid-stream will I lose any history? The one challenge I have run into is turn-by-turn session history. Claude complains about memory constraints. It constantly has to go back and re-learn what it did in our sessions a week or two ago. It accidentally deleted many of its own files so I convinced it to store everything in a .claude sub-directory in my fork of the other persons code so that I can keep it backed up when the claude sandbox has issues. Claude seems to want to talk me out of changing models which I found odd. I'm just doing this as a hobby for fun and adding features to a program I use. I am trying to make the most of the boost they gave me for August. My account is max pro. (5x more than pro). I am also trying to make the most of this thing in the event that these business models do not pan out.