With Fable being per token instead of on the subs (unless they changed it again?), I decided to test Claude code on OpenRouter where I had some credits, with Opus 4.8 and Fable 5.

I asked both a trivial question (summarize last commit). Opus cost 50 cents, Fable about $1.

That checks out because Fable's twice as much in the API (though I think its emphasis on correctness makes the difference larger for bigger tasks).

But, at $1 per question, I think I will stick to the subscription for now! I was certainly glad GPT-5.6-Sol is included in OpenAI's subscription, and I'm curious if they'll be able to do the same for GPT-6.

All the VC money appears to have run out a few weeks ago.

As for context size and harnesses I did make a trivial bash agent based on this "agent in 50 lines" tutorial[0] recently, and found that for trivial work, it was about an order of magnitude cheaper and faster.

I haven't tested it on anything bigger but it doesn't seem to do the kind of proactive testing, that they do in bigger harnesses.

Codex at least has a system prompt that tells it not to consider a feature a complete until it has verified it. I'm not sure about Claude Code.

I suppose I could add that one line to the prompt, and it would get me much closer to agi :) I think Fable does this proactively even without a prompt, but I haven't tested that yet.

If Fable in my own harness is significantly cheaper than Claude Code, that would be very appealing. (I could actually afford to use it for most things!) But I think most of the cost comes from the testing it does. So we'll have to see.

[0] https://minimal-agent.com/

Fable's subscription inclusion theoretically ends EOD today. Anthropic put a wishy-washy "if we have capacity we'll continue it" thing, and given how competitive GPT 5.6 Sol is, and it is included in OpenAI's subscription, I fully expect Anthropic to extend Fable or they will have a serious exodus on their hands.

Competition is good.