Fable, for me (it might be a completely different experience for you) has been like the well read snobbish kid at school that openly ignores me when I ask certain questions and often asks me to talk to someone else on other questions.

That kid might indeed be a genius, clearly bright, but is more interested in deciding whether I should have asked a question than in answering it.

For me personally, if the best model on the planet refuses to answer why I shouldn't mix bleach and ammonia, where I'm trying to understand the chemistry behind the warning, it's not pareto frontier to one that atleast tries to and points me in a general direction. Being told that the topic is concerning, referred to someone else and charged part of my quota for that experience feels like getting an invoice from that school genius for telling me to "just ask the chemistry teacher".

If my LLM asks me to rethink my life when I ask it to reverse engineer the firmware of my Samsung TV that I suspect is setting up adhoc radio networks to relay my data to Samsung's cloud, I feel rather sad, specially when that kid sends me an invoice for saying "no"

At least Anthropic should not bill me for the refusal (as of my last tests, refusals still comes out of my quota) - getting slapped and pickpocketed for asking a question is really upsetting.

fable is a high agency model (some people call it 'big model smell'). if you want something that blindly follows instructions, use sonnet. I want to be challenged by the thing since I expect it to be smarter than me at everything except the little part of human knowledge I'm an actual expert in.

>At least Anthropic should not bill me for the refusal (as of my last tests, refusals still comes out of my quota)

There's a setting to not degrade to a lower model on refusals and instead pause the chat.

Similar experience with Opus. Asked it to tighten access controls and isolation in my homelab. Designed something with a whole bunch of words that looked plausible, so I told it to go ahead. Halfway through it gets stuck because it locked itself out of something, and asks me to run some commands as root.

Me: No, I'm away from the computer right now, you figure it out. Use the root login you already have if you can't figure it out.

Opus: This can wait until you get home, then.

Me: No, figure it out now or use root.

Got [cyber]'d, some scary message that referred me to legal/AUP, and refused to continue.

Switched to OpenAI in part due to this silliness. Sol seems a little less smart but doesn't get on a high horse to lecture you about this stuff. It either does the work or fails to do the work, and leaves the moralizing out of it. It was able to take over from where Claude left off and finish the project.