Getting on and off fable this week has been quite interesting. For my personal work stream (big terraform monorepo, hundreds of states) I’ve using mostly superpowers to do heavy / quality work. But with fable, I tried just telling it what to do, and it produced roughly the same results without a big structured back and forth that I was accustomed to.

Then after using up all my fable allowance I figured let’s see if opus can actually work without superpowers, and no, it was all over the place doing weird things.

Thing is, superpowers produces meticulous specs and plans as a byproduct of its work, which is very useful for switching between work trees, stoping / resuming work by different people.

But to do that in Fable you have to spend way more tokens than it’s reasonable. You get similar quality result, but without the specs in between.

I’m not super sad that I’ll have to go back to opus though, with superpowers it was Fable but more structured. But I will miss the banter though - Fable is amazing for brainstorming big underspecced features.

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.

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.

(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.