alt Hacker NewsIf you haven’t been really running and testing these models yourself, they are all benchmaxxed. No matter how close they score to frontier on whatever metric, they always fall apart in real world tasks and their token efficiency is ridiculously bad. Fireworks has incredible incentive to make this claim in a headline, because Fireworks hosting K3 for you is pure profit for them, unlike when they host closed source models.
Replies
Yes, they are all benchmaxxed, but the question is how benchmaxxed they are relative to each other.
We run an evaluation that only compares models in open-ended multi-agent environments where agents affect each other, primarily testing writing code. It's designed to be less vulnerable because there's no solution set, and it's been pretty effective and tends to rank Chinese models lower than their advertised model cards (relative to US models). Kimi K3 is a bit of an exception there -- it truly is a near-frontier model. But it's so slow. Ironically, Muse Spark 1.1 is one of the strongest models we've tested after Fable and Sol while also leading the cost efficiency curve. Big turnaround from Llama 4.
Data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings
Fable works very well for me on a moderately large codebase. I have had to correct it a few times or point it on the right track, but given how much faster it is at programming than I am that's a very minor issue (and most of these errors are because I underspecified what I wanted in the prompt, I can only think of two cases where it was genuinely wrong... that's a lot better than me in my professional career). Code quality is equal to what I would come up with (and better in areas I'm not familiar with) and the overall software engineering bar is higher because it doesn't get bored when I tell it to do refactors or write integration/regression tests that I would otherwise put off. Also makes it easy to audit code for things like missing audit logging or error notifications that a human would get bored doing.
The product is a fairly standard Ruby on Rails webapp with postgres as the DB. Application complexity is probably a bit higher than average for a webapp. So it's nothing that pushes the boundaries of software engineering, but it is a real product. Token budget has not been an issue for me. I pay for the Max plan ($200/month) and it is well worth it.
didn't read the article, but just the title felt fishy because of course an inference provider wouldn't mind claiming to provide access to a mythos-class model. So far, GLM 5.2 is still my go-to, even at less than a third the parameter count compared to Kimi K3
So they aren’t as good as 2024 models? 2025?
You got baited by bad sampling settings.
It's exactly the opposite. Go turn on min_p once it's available post July 27th and most of the problems you describe will go away.
[flagged]
All you've said needs the qualifier - "for now!" Look at the trend line. It's clear that if they're not yet at the level of being "good enough" for coding, they will be soon. Sensationalist headlines aside, we all need to be preparing for a world where open models can do pretty much any software tasks you need them to.
I have been testing the various models, and I would not call Fable SOTA.
I can't actually get Fable to do anything. I only work on back-end code, and the moment Fable notices the jwt scope checks on the endpoints it's game over, it refuses to do anything because security is involved.
So for me, Fable is completely useless, the bar is very low, any llm that will actually attempt the task beats it every time.
Having tested K3, Qwen 3.8 max preview, Fable and Sol for the past few days, I partially agree. Don’t trust the benchmarks, and the Chinese models really are slow and token-inefficient.
However they do seem very close to SOTA : I’d say roughly equal to previous gen (Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5). It’s yet another silly benchmark, but compare them here: https://senko.net/vibecode-bench/
I also had K3, Qwen3.8 and Fable (using Kimi Code, Qwen Code and Claude Code harnesses respectively, and the official APIs) create a simple but far from trivial web app (zero shot, from a detailed spec). In user testing all three results looked/behaved more or less the same. I had Sol (via codex) do code reviews on all three and it concluded all three were solid, with some room for improvement. Fable was slightly ahead of the pack.
In my own work I still prefer Opus 4.8 (until Antrophic come to their senses and allow 100% Fable usage on Max plans) and Sol, but if I had to find an alternative, I could live with both K3 and Qwen3.8 just fine.