alt Hacker NewsWe're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12
Comments
The drug dealers are giving out a bit more of a free hit to get people hooked on the more expensive models.
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.
EDIT: corrected usage cut amount
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.
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..
If they pair this with a reset, then it will be good news. Otherwise we all just rushed to use our quota before the July 7th deadline for nothing.
Corollary: use your quota now because a reset seems likely.
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.
The drug dealer sample strategy seems to work good for them.
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.
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 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.
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.
I knew this was going to happen. It’s just part of Dario’s hype strategy.
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.
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.
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?
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.
@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.
This reality show kind of bored me already. I haven’t even made an attempt to use Fable 5.
Is it so amazing? Or is it the “intermittent reward” and exclusivity driving people to use it?
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.
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?
I have a really hard time understanding how anyone is ready to pay $200/mo to be put on such a rollercoaster all the time.
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.
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.
Anyone understand what the point is of only extending it for 5 days?
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 was rushing to make the most of Fable today, and I'm at 67%, with limit reset on July 11th.
If would've used it more moderately if I had known in advance.
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.
I think HN deserves a collective round of applause on this one: almost everyone here predicted this would happen.
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.
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
Still definitely not trying it if I'm gonna lose access on my subscription plan.
"First hit is free", indeed.
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.
Anthropic: reminder that DeepSeek-V4 GA version is expected to debut on July 13 as showcase for the release of the Huawei Ascend 950dt
Anyone got any usage left to use it ?
does it matter much? i find my claude code experience always downgraded from fable to opus anyway.
like a fent plug on Market st
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.
Thank you, Anthropic. This random drop in the bucket wants you to know that this was a big deal for them!
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-...)
...because there's not enough token addicts and we need a proper set of whales.
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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?
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.