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.
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 :) )
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Open AI land: simply using 5.6 Sol Max.
so gone or not I dont think I miss a shit