And honey, us the fable

So there was a brief period where I had Fable access, and it was at the same time incredible, frustrating, and expensive. When I use Claude Code, I like to have it write a clear plan about the big picture I want to tackle, and once that’s done and I’m ha with it, I’ll have it tackle individual phases of the plan in separate sessions; for less challenging phases, I can also use a smaller model for efficiency. I even had Sonnet and Opus run the same phase in parallel, and chose the best implementation when they are both done.

I tried having Fable do the same thing for one of the bigger features: the just-in-time compiler. It wrote a very intricate plan, and when I gave my approval, it just went off and yolo’d the whole thing. It even ignored my asks to stop and check in its progress. I was a little worried it would blow through my weekly quota and leave me with a half-finished feature on an un-pushed branch until the end of Sunday. Luckily it finished with some headroom, and delivered a pretty decent start for the JIT. I just wish it would stop and check sometimes: design and engineering is not just about a solid plan and good execution, looking at things in progress and asking, “is this working” is also important.

So yeah, I’m a little disappointed that Fable had to be pulled from public use. But it’s not the end of the world. Opus 4.8 is, not great, but it’s good enough and there is still the meat-hosted model in my skull.