Fable is a good model. As with all new models, it is simultaneously excellent and entirely unremarkable (relative to other models). It is slow and expensive, and the "loops are all you need" discourse they are pushing is obvious in the context of someone using Fable-class models
What I've found so far is that for broad scope design (code architecture) tasks, Fable is unremarkable. Or, not better enough to justify its cost and speed.
But in highly targeted goal-oriented loops, it is another beast entirely. It is very slow but produces very good results.
I let it churn on optimizing a SwiftUI-layout resolver in Go I wrote and it was able to bring it down to an order of magnitude I could not reach myself (micro => nanosecond scale). But it took 2 hours and $40 to do it and I had to claw back some changes it overfit to Apple Silicon. Still, very worth it.
In comparison, for "implement this feature/change" iterative work, I ran head-to-head Fable vs GPT5.5 vs. GLM-5.1. They all produced equally acceptable final results, but GPT5/GLM did it in a couple minutes and Fable was churning away for 40 minutes. And GLM cost me less than a dollar, GPT5.5 ~$1.50, and Fable cost $9.
You can see that in this context, interactively working with an agent is nonsense. Its too slow. You need to write loops to keep the agent working and you probably want to highly parallelize the work being done. As with all things, I think a balance makes sense...
My sense is that I'd reserve Fable for targeted, surgical analysis and work. Not for daily driving everyday tasks.
I'm going to keep spending a shitload of money (relatively) and maining Fable for the rest of the week to continue to judge, will report if anything changes. I'll continue to head-to-head as well.
I strive to make my writing unsummarizable, in the sense that it has so little fluff left in it that if you take any words out, as summaries by definition do, you lose a lot of interesting ideas.
If big companies can't make a net return on their LLM token costs, that doesn't mean it's impossible to. In fact this is exactly what you'd expect to happen with a new technology. Incumbents can't use it well, and are replaced by upstarts who can.
Andy absolutely spot on. When you have superstar in your team, you don't have to downplay that. Just accept, acknowledge and celebrate that. It's not like Gambhir crying everywhere that I want to end this culture just out of jealousy because he never got that stardom.
🚨“Please travel in it only if you have learned your toilet manners,” said Chief Project Manager Ananth Rupanagudi of the Vande Bharat Sleeper
follow @india_plus_