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I'm curious to hear your Fable use cases. In the brief time it was available, I didn't get to do much. The only project I had on my plate was a simple web application, which it pumped it in a way that felt no better/worse than if I had Opus. What sort of task would you recommend for Fable that you wouldn't for Opus?
I'm grinding through a several week long session now. Opus is doing a better than human job but in little bits and bobs, but I was able to switch to Fable a few days ago and it was just chewing through it. It would sit and think for 10 minutes and then rip out a 700 line delta across 6 C++ files that would compile the first time and nail the feature in an iteration or two. It just kept that pace up.
Two days later Fable was yanked away from me while it was in the middle of implementing a feature and Opus couldn't figure out how to finish it with the uncommitted code that Fable had left. It just stashed it and started over and I told it it's late and to go to bed.
I feel a bit of loss over it
Opus has been doing a fine job but after a day or so with it it was clear Fable was significantly better.
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Fable is much more of a 'do it right the first time' model than Opus. I had three pages of instructions for a feature. It just does what I ask, gets it all right, then tests it without me asking and tells me about the balancing! Opus could've done all that too if I cut up the instructions a bit but there'd be some minor glitches and I'd have to go over and fix it.
Better planner too. I was planning out a project with Opus 4.6 a few months ago, never really started it. Tried the same prompt with Fable and it come up with a few strokes of brilliance Opus never found. When making the initial demonstrator, Opus made a crap sandbox that needed a couple of rounds of debugging to even work and it wasn't very satisfactory. So I tried with Fable. Fable made a much nicer, prettier sandbox with more content that worked the first time and had all these things already set up to test. it puts in more care and effort as well as being smarter.
Better writer too. It is to Opus as Opus is to Sonnet.
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I set it to the hardest task there is: understanding me. It did very well. As well as me. I want so badly to be the psychiatrist that Anthropic hired to analyze Mythos, as detailed in the system card. Probably can't be that person, not enough time. But Fable is a very good psychiatrist. Once the regulatory and legal barriers fall, I'm hoping I have enough money to enjoy the fireworks from a safe distance.
Opus is very good. But I wouldn't use it for anything at all, if Fable was available.
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