A sample of one, but I was getting more stuff done despite Fable uses tokens twice as fast as Opus, because it understood the goals so well and worked to achieve them.

Same experience. Wouldn't waste my tokens on easy stuff for it. It blasted through some of my toughest problems and produced some truly great code.

Can you give an example of what those "toughest problems/great code" are? I don't need to know the prompt nor the output, but the general idea, what it is about.

Some very tough computational geometry problems I couldn't solve on my own, nor with the assistance of other AIs or my colleagues. Fable did them all first go. The most impressive built a custom optimizer with a ludicrous number of adaptive switches that absolutely crunched through an error surface with a bunch of nontrivial nullspaces and some wild curvature. That optimizer is of independent interest; it's not totally novel in theory, but the implementation is an impressive piece of engineering.

Was it a better prompt? Have you tried giving the same prompt to other models?

I have found out that the mistakes of other models (which I choose first to save money) help me refine the prompt more and more, until I am fed up and pick Opus 4.8 (for example) which magically seems to get it right, but there is a lot of pre-work there...

Yes I have tried giving these same prompts to other models. The difference has been painfully clear. Switching back to Opus, it is completely unable to do anything that I had asked of Fable without significant conceptual and engineering errors. Functioning code, sure, but not even remotely capable of accomplishing the task to the accuracy I need. Sonnet, GPT 5.5, Gemini, DeepSeek, it's all the same deal. I accepted this in the past because that was just how it was. Now it's tremendously irritating.

I wish Fable really was only a minor upgrade so that it wouldn't be missed, but this feels like the difference between having a post-doctoral colleague and educating a student that I have to constantly guide and correct. It's so profound for me that some of the reactions in this thread feel like they come from another reality entirely. Or maybe they just got instantly diverted to Opus, who knows.

> more stuff done

More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction

Given the same usage limits, I was able to get more stuff done and not even hit the usage limits, because I wasn't working on constantly fixing what Opus was trying to do, Fable just understands the task correctly and works great with the given context.

Same, I was actually having interesting thought experiments with Fable.

I even upgraded my Max plan because Fable was doing so well.

Same here, now n=2.

Same here, not n=3, plus the above 3 reporting, so n=6 and rising

Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?

Yep. I love open source but there isn’t a model that comes close still to the closed source options like Opus 4.8 and that’s obvious from most people I see across the software industry as well. There are at least another few models after Opus from OpenAI and Anthropic most would go down the list using before any of the Chinese models at this point.

I could really use something that can just refactor a few classes and create DTOs from entities.

> Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.

Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable

Opus 4.8 has taken such a beating over the last couple of days since the release of fable, videos online of people referring to it like the “redheaded stepchild” (is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist) basically at this point, everyone is going to be seriously disappointed to fall back to that.

> is there a better way of saying this, this sounds racist

It's not racist or even politically incorrect in the US, it's a common saying.

Yes, I am aware. Kind of paints redheads as unwanted though. Seems hurtful.

Yeah, not sure where the phrase originated but it does sound bad when you put some thought into it. My sister is a redhead and people loved to make fun of her growing up, telling her there's no way two parents with brown hair could have a kid with red hair, so the mailman (who also had red hair) was obviously her dad.

As a foreigner, the casual racism against red-haired people in the US and UK always baffled me.

If anything is racist here it's thinking that redheads are a separate race.

Feel free to replace "racism" with "discrimination" if you prefer. English is not my first language and the minutiae elude me.

As long as the person is white no one will blink an eye no matter what you say.

Except that’s all every MAGA can talk about. This take is from 2010

And still just as relevant.

> If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.

GPT-5.5 isn't awful.