This. My workflow is a heavily-modified and personalised superpowers, and the docs that it produces are an asset. I tried Fable and it just ran off and did shit. Mostly that was good shit, but not all, and I would have liked to have had some input to those decisions.

I realise this is just me needing to structure my use of Fable better. But I got to a really nice place with my Opus workflow and I'm reluctant to go through that every time a new model releases.

I like super powers because I can be more in the loop editing and understanding the plan. Letting fable loose is genuinely impressive, and probably perfect for vibe coding, but I can’t be that far away from the plan and steps for code that matters.

As for being great for vibe coding, it’s cool but I can’t justify that kind of cost for throwaway code. At this point I’ve had good experiences using fable to review code, but I’m totally content with opus for all of my workflows still. If fable was the same price I’d switch (for projects not involving biology, at least), but I’d still use something like super powers to stay in the loop.

(Not a Claude user) What is "superpowers"?

This is an interesting comment because it makes me want to ask the question, what is the use for fable then? For me, GPT 5.4 is enough when using recursive-mode. I do appreciate GPT 5.5 Pro for some larger research, architecture, planning tasks though. I think that's what Fable is for. A very small % of total work.

Ya, and it works. I now default to Fable-for-the-design, Opus-for-the-build mode, which is sort of cost effective, but I am hooked. Opus does not compare when it comes to architecture, designs and algorithms, esp. for gnarly problems without an obvious compromise-free solution.

It's not free. It uses a lot of your quota.

> Looks like all the reporting about Anthropic trying their earnest to turn a profit this quarter is true.

That's not how any of this works.

Anthropic is playing the long game; they're not going make a short-sighted decision just so they announce a profit for one quarter, which doesn’t mean much because it won’t be a sustainable profit since they're going to need to spend a ton of money on training and compute over the next few months.

That's why they did a G funding round for $14 billion in February and $65 billion in May.

I suspect one reason for switching Fable to API usage for the near future is they don't have enough compute for their enterprise customers and every hobbyist on their $20/month Pro plan, 80% of which don’t need Fable 5 anyway but that won't stop them from using it as much as they can.

What makes you think your usage is getting cut by 50% post July 13th? It's just that you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable right now, and that is what is going away.

I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.

This is the first I'm hearing about a usage cut. Do you have a link to an announcement for this? Search hasn't shown anything.

Subscription is ~$200/month. When I tried running on tokens it was ~$500/day for the same usage pattern.

My guess is my usage is atypically high, but even if the average equivalent is $100-250/day you can get a sense of how much Anthropic is subsidizing subscriptions as a loss leader to lock market share. IMHO this is a doomed strategy since open models will get into a long tail of parity and they’ll ultimately essentially be in the business of commodity compute.

> In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex.

IME Codex had a bit of a big head/ego about writing what it thinks I ought to want rather than what I actually ask for, and I've had to spend some time cleaning up its slop.

I maximised usage and have reached the limit. I feel like I did 2 week's worth of hobby work over the last few days.

I got Fable to write multiple plans, spent a great part of the weekend reviewing them. Then with superpowers I left must of those plans executing with little intervention over the past few days.

I struggled to get Opus to just keep going without trying to convince me that it's late.

I tried it but the difference to Opus didn’t seem to justify the extra cost and stress around these limits.

The Max plan at 180€/month excl VAT already comes up for budget review every time. Not sure any sort of increase will be tolerated at all.

Personally, I forgot the initial deadline was so soon and hadn't found anything to use it for yet.

I used up all my Fable credits over the weekend and looks like it’s completely reset as of today.

I was planning on using it all until today so I burned quite a lot yesterday.

> I can't imagine that's many people

Well, I don't know how many people it is but I certainly haven't bothered to use it except once or twice. What's the point in getting used to it as a daily driver when it won't be available in perpetuity?

But in any event, you're still right that it won't affect those of us in that camp.

Yes, especially in light of possible GPT-5.6, any day now. No reset = easy switch to 5.6. nobody wants to drop that usage.

I used up all my Fable credits over the weekend. Looks like mine just reset today.

it's incredible how volatile the product and pricing situation is right now. i struggle to find an equivalent industry that has been so all over the place and obtuse

I kind of think they force reset last week. Which actually instead of giving me two weekly cycles of use only gave me a single week of use.

Every single thing about this is fuck users fuck your usage. All those subscriptions I bought to enjoy Fable for the time allotted? Basically gone, didn't get to use the ~4 weeks if cycles or so I had planned for, bought, anticipating. I got two. And now if I want one week more, I need to pay for a full month.

Anthropic is just the most miserable evil grinch. Everything here has totally defied everything that's been laid out for what we were told we'd get and gotten worse and worse, with less and less. Anthropic cannot general an iota of goodwill.

Does it? Maybe. But I've grown weary of it. It feels like I'm in a relationship with a mercurial partner, never quite knowing where I stand.

It’s only a question of time. I think right now 60% of AI paper published is from China. They are already the bests at cost optimization

It's also possible that giving access to Fable when lots of people have been taking time away from working on things (4th July, World Cup, etc) meant they didn't spend much time with it.

It is, many people are hungry for GPT-5.6, considering it is supposed to be Fable class, with lower costs. Many Claude users were ready to jump ship.

It was foreseen.

Anthropic wants companies that use API billing. Their growth period through hooking individual users who bring it to the business is over.

Opus 4.8 xhigh is my daily driver for everything. I'd say Fable's edge is visible when designing for a complex problem with no obvious, idiomatic solutions. It is good at greenfield designs, and good at pointing out the pros and cons of hard design choices. I now do designs with Fable, and do implementations off those designs with Opus. Pretty happy. For a while I was using Fable for everything, but burned through a lot of real money for not much value, I think for coding its slow and not at all better than Opus.

They have an IPO to launch, so they're not going to do that.

I have a feeling they are waiting for the upcoming ChatGPT release to decide.

Seriously, just let me fucking pay to get steady service 24/7.

American Tech companies hate their users

There is absolutely 0 chance Anthropic or OpenAI will get a government bailout (it might still happen in this admin but it makes no sense). These companies are not like banks which are fundamentally important to the economy. Sure AI is important but Google is not going to die. Why would you save OpenAI and Anthropic when google, amazon or microsoft can just gobble them up when/if needed?

The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM. It might change in the future but for now that is true. This was exactly the reverse with banking, everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow

If they were going to do this, they must have known a few days in advance. Feels intentional.

This is the second time you posted essentially the same message 40 minutes later, are you stuck in a loop? I wonder if people are looping in addition to their AI agents.

Paying $100/month and using Opus 4.8 all the time to get my work done. I had a brief look at fable (when it was available the 1st time) but it burned my allowance to fast. So I keep paying the $100 for Opus and enjoy friction-less uninterrupted work.

I'm usually at 60-70% usage at the end of a 5 hour window, that's the pace where I can still think about what to delegate and what to expect and verify the results. Could probably go faster but that would have a significant impact on output quality.

I pay $200/mo because my opus usage alone is >$10k/mo at api rates. Do you think I’m making a mistake?

I pay that much and don't even use Fable because everything I do involves biology

I would pay $200/mo for Opus 4.8 already. Fable 5 is just a cherry on top (although, without it, Codex 5.5 is the better buy imo).

I would pay vastly more, I think it’s incredible value. If I had no other choice I think I’d pay up to $1K per day. The amount of work I’m getting through is absolutely immense.

Oh gee $2000 worth of tokens from the best available model for $200 wonder how people shell out that kind of cash

I pay $200/mo and they provide me a tool that writes all the code I want. Seems like a great deal to me.

Sure not the best user experience. But maybe they thought compute was gonna be more, or maybe fable helped them optimize under load.

I'm tired too. I'll switch to OpenAI if Sol is available on subscription models.

Agreed, but let's not forget to put at least some of the blame on the Trump administration for the export control fiasco.

Same here. 20% usage already with just half a day usage. Wish they'd commit to keeping it on Max, even if severely limited.

Same here, I'm at 98% :(

They think they're giving you something when they're actually taking something away.

I only use Fable on things Opus 4.8 would struggle too much with, and as my harness improves that’s less and less. That or they dialed up the intelligence on Opus.

Do you mean in tokens or in $?

> I need an AI harness that lets me switch LLM models dynamically depending on the task.

OpenRouter put up something about this a few days ago. Check out their Advisor and Subagent docs.

Perhaps. I don’t blame them for short horizons given capacity constraints, government mayhem, etc. Promising anything more than a week at a time seems fraught.

I half expected OpenAI to make GPT 5.6 available today, just to tempt people to switch over. Either way, I'm glad Fable is staying accessible, it's been fun.

That's funny. Sonnet is not great in my opinion. I mean, it often amazes me with its creativity, and I do prefer its style over most bigger models from other providers.

But it also constantly just does dumb things that make me slap my forehead. Opus is a lot better but the slap ratio has not reached 0 yet. Fable seems a bit better there, more testing needed.

But yeah, VC money ran out, now we wait for Moore's Law... :)

--

Re: Sonnet-ish-pricing. GLM-5.2 is cheaper than that, and appears to be "Opus-ish" in quality. I've been having a reasonably fine time with it. My experience is that it's "very solid for small and medium tasks", haven't tested it for anything bigger though.

> Use up all my Fable time last week

I'm spending more time catering to Fable and Anthropic's B.S. than solving problems with Fable. I'm increasingly convinced not getting this deeply baked into single models and going back deep learning on topics of interest is both more fun and useful. (This week: chlorophyll chemistry under heat, also the Sri Lankan civil war.)