Anthropic is lucky that they've built a lot of loyalty over the last year that they can burn through right now. I see people talking about switching back to Opus 4.8 rather that using 5.6 Sol, which is wild.

My current approach is to occasionally use Fable for high-intelligence tasks but use Sol as the translator and clean-upper afterwards, and otherwise just use Sol for everything. Fable sometimes says the most insane shit, both unreadable and just completely missing the point, and refuses to back down when questioned. It's mentally exhausting to work with and I can't trust it.

I think Fable is the beginning of Anthropic switching to training models as agent-first, tool second. It’s certainly the best model if you want something to work autonomously without supervision and don’t care to read the code. The code and writing is ugly but it can complete huge tasks and fix its own work.

I'm still on opus 4.6 for a healthy chunk on work; the technical competence has lagged behind but the slop-comment generation and misdirected self-initiated actions on newer models ultimately burn more time than a little more babysitting, but I'm optimizing for minimized slop generation over sheer generation speed.