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?
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 :) )
Anthropic keeps on burning people the same way. Destroy the little (if any) trust left... The competitors will eat you alive.
Finally, I can sleep... I'd been working non-stop all weekend to use Fable before it disappeared tomorrow. Now, please, a reset. ;)
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.
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 :)
Keep using Fable. Don't think about using GPT 5.6 Sol
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.
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.
PLEASE MAKE UP YOUR MIND.
I have claude, codex, cursor and kiro, all most basic teir and swap around. I like anthropic the best. I would have upgraded to Claude Max 20x by now (and dropped the others) if you would just incldue an amount of fable in the subscription. I would have done it on the first of this month if I'd know fable would be included until the 19th. However I'm not sure I want to at all as I feel you will just rug pull me or string me along in another way and constantly be threatening to change things. I have other stuff to think about, the last thing I want is my tool provider constantly changing their mind on things, making me waste mental energy on -p or fable access.
I don't really want to but it would be so much easier to just go with codex right now...