Fable extended until 19 July | Hacker News Reader

Fable extended until 19 July

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94 pointsprotoman300051 comments

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?

Oh gosh, that would be so nice. The triple whammy of (a) two layers of annoying timed usage windows, (b) constantly changing model availability windows, and (c) random unpredictable usage resets, is absolutely brutal for anyone who is trying to plan methodically and be efficient.

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.

We should be insulted by this tbh, I'm shifting some of my plans to open AI while this continues, it's just pretty absurd to be jerked around like this. Not to mention the "safeguards" :/. Thank goodness for competition.

> 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.

tbf anthropic reset the usage quotas with every fable promotion "extension" in the past weeks. I was also worried about having <25% of usage quotas for the rest of the week because i was trying to squeeze every token out of the fable promotion but then usage limits were reset meaning i could use almost double the tokens my plan would allow.

Hopefully the same will happen this time but there’s no announcement and it’s uncertain and unpredictable, which is less than ideal. Personally I am using all my quota before Monday morning Pacific time anyway, hoping they will do a reset when the team is back in the office. If I’ve bet incorrectly, I will have wasted my 25% by using it all in one day, in a rush and therefore inefficiently, rather than being able to take my time and plan it out. That’s what irks me the most.

In fact I’d say the entire system of weekly quotas and resets seems quite poorly designed. A constant rate continuous recharging model would work much better, like a battery. No arbitrary usage period phasing, no waiting for 5:45am on Sunday morning for your quota to reset. There would be no worrying about how your specific reset time aligns with the additional random resets or model availability. That would be a much better user experience and would cost them nothing.

THEIR PLAN IS TO FIND AS MANY WHALES AS POSSIBLE. Why do you ask?

The plan is to stay relevant at all costs. Hence the spectacular gaslighting and flailing messaging.

Just cancel and switch to OpenAI. That's what I'm going to do. My current Max subscription runs out in like 20 days. That's the time they have to get their shit together and make their flagship model actually usable on a subscription without some stupid "safety" classifier downgrading to Opus every other turn.

I thought Anthropic's plan with Fable was "we detected you doing something we don't like but we won't tell you what, falling back to Opus 4.8". I think the name Fable is quite appropriate for a model that doesn't actually seem to exist.

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...

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 :) )

The sort of thing Fable and Sol excel at are long horizon tasks. The sort of thing I have been using them for is migrating large numbers of repositories to new tooling simultaneously (adopting new linters, enabling dependabot automerge, rolling out mutation testing).

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.

For my needs, Opus does these kind of "long horizon tasks" well enough already, with additional tooling.

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've been chunking out my plans like this for months, and even maintain a port of Get-Shit-Done https://github.com/LoganDark/get-shit-done to the Jujutsu version control system because that was the best way for me to make the most of Opus.

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.

For normal building work I use Opus to plan and GPT 5.6 Terra to build. The point is, these are not normal constrained building tasks.

Perhaps I should have had more faith in Opus's ability to complete tasks like these, but it just hasn't been my experience to date. Opus and 5.5 work great within constrained user story type tasks, but I just don't have confidence in them to complete a large unbounded task like: "find out why the shared dependabot automerge component isn't working on this one repo, then formulate a strategy to roll it out across these 90 other repos, ensuring that Python, Rust, Typescript, go, sensible, and GitHub actions are all correctly updated. Address any CI failures, codex and codescene review comments in your PRs, then merge on green."

Personally I apply it every so often to audit codebases but it’s mainly sonnet and Gemini for most tasks. That and a harness for an agent to keep iterating on a goal is perfect. I’m more concerned buy getting hooked on the 50% increase on all models, not just Fable.

Fable is the first one I found could bring brainstorming concepts closer to what I was striving for instead of adding in clutter and defocusing.

... and then it stopped having that ability to build on create concise, accurate summaries and expand on them. Same problem with GPT 5.6 Sol. I even tried and old prompt in the (more nerfed) recent version. The core initial thinking ability lowered, and I'm getting the same over-metacognition and epistemology as it tries to pull at threads in the brainstoriming process again.

> What kind of tasks do you use it for

There are some bugs that just seem to elude Opus and GPT 5.5. An example is an Elixir/LiveView app that I wrote for personal use that basically gives me a full tmux in my browser from the system it's running on (very useful for VMs or when on-the-go on mobile and need to run a quick command or two). On mobile the scrolling is complex and janky and even Fable struggled to figure it out, even with me spoon feeding direction.

> what did you do 6 months ago when SOTA models were as intelligent as today's B team?

The bugs didn't get fixed. I tried, oh did I try. New bugs (worse than the one fix) introduced, other things breaking, etc. I just lived with the bugs or fixed them myself.

Plannig and review. You want the best plan and when its done you want to catch all the bugs. Implementation can be almost anything.

Of course you can do the planning and reviewing by hand but sota models do a pretty great job, especially in review (please still read the code).

ml research, both brainstorming and running experiments

eg I'd throw a hypothesis at it in the evening, and overnight it would write the code, do a sanity check, start a run, monitor the metrics, identify and fix a bug, propose a new hypothesis based on the results, write the code and start the second experiment, etc

still not that good at generating ideas or drawing conclusions, but much better at criticism than opus

even the api price is not that expensive for this

For the particular task I'm working on (a mathematical task in validated numerics), even Sol has generally just repeatedly given up. I asked it for the main problems it could not solve, gave them to Fable, and Fable solves them, every time.

There is a clear hierarchy here and Fable is well and truly at the top for very tough tasks. It just sucks that Anthropic is so incompetent at delivering a cost-effective experience without the uncertainty of it getting pulled. It doesn't matter how strong their model is, customers will turn away.

For ordinary coding (making webapps, frontend and backend), the non-SOTA models do fine, but the SOTA models have better judgement and need me to intervene less often, allowing workflows like "Go and pitch me a solution to this problem, then go build it". 6 months ago, I would give lower-level tasks and read more of the code myself.

So I don't "need" the SOTA models, but they do help considerably. And I am also working on some other projects that may have been outside the reach of the earlier models entirely.

Subagents are a godsend. Frontier models for initial planning and spec writing, cheaper models for implementing from the spec, frontier models for review. Frontier models to help with research. The availability of cheaper models is great, since it gives more price points for different tasks.

Finally, I can sleep... I'd been working non-stop all weekend to use Fable before it disappeared tomorrow. Now, please, a reset. ;)

I'm pretty sure you're not the only one. My relief was less about having another week of Fable access, and more "thank goodness I might get a normal night of sleep tonight".

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.

The second a product appears too scarce or expensive for sustained use, I steer away from it. I don't need to become attached to things I can't rely on. Fable gobbles up tokens at a completely unreasonable rate anyway so it's basically useless. The other day it chewed through my 5 hour session window for all models in about an hour. Leaves a pretty sour taste in your mouth.

They actually increased Fable's resource consumption after last week's usage reset. A 5h window with fable would use 5% of my weekly quota before the reset, and it suddenly started consuming 10% weekly immediately after. Just a final insult after weeks of jerking people around. Finally motivated me to cancel.

I don't understand how people are angered by this. I understand that it may be difficult to plan, but in the end, we're getting more without being charged. No-one's forcing folks to use up credits. Take it for the bonus it is.

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.

Anthropic land: praying for Fable, dreaming of Mythos.

Open AI land: simply using 5.6 Sol Max.

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.

This is truly vindication for my efforts to get off of frontier models and harnesses as much as possible.

I won't deny the model is _pretty good_ but it is not worth all of this whiplash.

I really envy you. There is a clear divide amongst my colleagues now in terms of who is using Fable and who isn't (this is math work, so it is well and truly better than all the other models). Everyone is quickly becoming reliant on this, and with Anthropic constantly changing their mind, it's just miserable.

You might be interested to learn I am primarily doing proofs & formal methods.

I have a couple of novel formalizations using some bolt-on programs I wrote for Claude Code, but I am mainly using it now to build my eval dataset for my custom inferencing and compute.

Keep using Fable. Don't think about using GPT 5.6 Sol

Not to mention how many different ways their communication can be interpreted just because of bad English.

This indecisiveness is ridiculous, and I am planning on switching back to GPT in the near future from Opus 4.8.

what is Anthropic going to do on July 19 though? Drop Fable and watch their users flock over to gpt5.6? I don't see it happening.

"Fable extended until 26 July" obviously.

this is the third extension already. they will keep extending and then keep it available for Max.

Anthropic keeps on burning people the same way. Destroy the little (if any) trust left... The competitors will eat you alive.

Sweet! Safeguards seem a bit over-tuned this morning, it was working on Lenia all night and now it won't touch it.

So, do you want me to trust technology you will shut down for some reason in random time? No, thanks :)

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.

This shit is absurd. Just decide whether Fable will be part of the subscription model or not. Are you losing too much money on it to be profitable? Say so. Did you see signups tank and lose a huge amount of users to OpenAI because of the Sol release? Is that why this is happening? Why would I pay for a service where I can't be sure what that service will offer exactly a week from now.

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

Nobody could have predicted this.

Apparently, not even Anthropic, otherwise they could have done us all a favour by announcing it sooner.

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.

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