I’ve had a chance to use fable 5.2. Some observations:

- Anthropic is finally well balanced across models. Meaning: Opus 5.5 is so good that I do not feel Fable FOMO as I did when it was Fable 5/5.1 vs Opus 4.8/5. And Sonnet 5.5 sometimes makes me forget about Opus.

- Fable is good, but you really have to push the ambition of your prompt in order to see proper separation from Opus 5.5. I personally have a hard time telling the difference between Fable 5.2 and Opus 5.5 for ordinary coding tasks.

- It’s way faster and more reliable: one of the worst things about fable 5.1 was how slow it was an, on top of that, how frequently it would suffer from max output token overflows. I got none of these issues with 5.2.

- Fable is exceptional at drawing. It’s ability to render an image with JavaScript actually has me questioning the value of dedicated image models. I prefer the images I’ve gotten fable/opus to make for me over those from gpt-image, it’s wild to think we’re at this point.

> Fable is good, but you really have to push the ambition of your prompt in order to see proper separation from Opus 5.5.

I love seeing this verbalized. We are pretty much at the point that increased model capability will only have utility to folks that are willing to let go of even more understanding of whatever the model is producing.

The best models can/will produce a year's worth of output that would take several days to weeks to properly understand in the span of an afternoon.

For everyone that still wants to feel like they own the end result, just use the lesser models with less ambitious tasks.

Caveat: I think this mainly applies to coding. I would still like the best models possible to be working on e.g. new drug research to cure our various ailments.

> Fable is exceptional at drawing. It’s ability to render an image with JavaScript actually has me questioning the value of dedicated image models

I’ve been shifting away from using more traditional GenAI models in favor of just giving LLMs access to a custom drawing language (LOGO-like) to generate imagery and its been going shockingly well - Opus 5.5 in particular.

I put together a simple LLM driven skill that creates old adventure game (EGA) environments from simple pencil sketches and it works really well. And being procedural, they're much easier to make surgical changes to without degradation.

https://kq-styles.specr.net

Your comment matches what I measured on 30 regular coding tasks: Fable 5.2 and Opus 5.5 both solved 26 (Fable 5.1 was at 25). Fable 5.2 finished in 0.62x the time of Fable 5.1 on the same tasks, with no runs hitting a safeguards stop (Fable 5.1 hit a lot of safeguard stops).

Does Fable 5.2 outperform Opus for data science work?

Not just "iterate on this XGBoost model" but actually looking at a problem and designing and carrying out a short-term R&D program including probability modeling, model fitting diagnostics, how to respond to various kinds of results, how to interpret/reason about what it finds, etc. That's really where I saw all the models perform poorly, and where I saw the first big step increase from Opus 5 (pre-5.5) to Fable. But then Opus 5.5 came out and I haven't needed Fable since.

Mind you, I'm doing slightly different work (and I'm very much "in the loop" still) than when I performed that side-by-side test. But it's really amazing what Opus 5.5 can do. I now have a powerful data science AI assistant that not only can write any script I need it to (including some scripts I didn't even realize I needed), and it has an encyclopedic knowledge of everything ever, and it constantly checks me on oversights, it handily derives expressions and clever model reparameterizations that aid, it has great insight into model behavior, and it has an amazing ability come up with ad-hoc experiments and tests that would have taken me 2x as long to even think of (let alone implement by hand).

It's not at the scared-to-lose-my-job phase yet, but it's become a tremendous force multiplier for a smaller data team.

how do you use Fable for drawing? directly editing a .svg or through claude design/or something else?

And none of it matters ... because just as soon as you are happy with things "balanced across models" Anthropic will nerf the models you were happy with, and force you to use new and more expensive ones.