alt Hacker NewsAnecdotal but I've found Fable to be fairly unimpressive and not much better than Opus 4.8, if at all in some cases, but I have been hitting the ceiling on my $100/mo sessions when I never did before. I switched back to Opus yesterday. I may use Fable for audits, but that's about it, and when it leaves my subscription plan I don't think I'll miss it.
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Fable always felt clearly a huge step above Opus for me. It's been able to one shot complex bugs and apps Opus could never solve. But it's expensive.
It's good for one shotting as it seems to be specifically trained for that. It's also good to act as an agent orchestrator.
I felt similarly but after using Fable heavily over the weekend and then flipping back to Opus I can feel a difference. Fable just gets more right the first time, guesses right the first time, and follows through better than Opus. Put simply, I could "trust" it more.
Opus is still great but I will be sad when I lose access to Fable on the 7th. In those few days I burned ~$1,400 in API credits (I'm on a subscription but that's the token cost) and while it was great, I can't justify that cost without it be subsidised. Comparatively, the records show I used about $1,200 total in the last month on Opus. I did use it heavily over the last 3 days but 3 vs 30 days and higher burn? Yeah, I can't afford that even if I made really good progress on my projects.
Yep, I'm having the same verdict. Interestingly, other people swear by it. I'm trying to understand what's going on with that.
I started telling a friend... I feel like Fable is Opus with extended reasoning that eventually "figures out more" because when I switched to it, I hit my limits surprisingly and shockingly quicker than I would with Opus, and I got less done. All this hype, and I much rather use Opus.
This tweet is a nice demo of Fable's one-shot capabilities: https://x.com/atomic_chat_hq/status/2072446067962978411. I'll quote the text for convenience, but what really shows the difference is the attached video.
> atomic.chat (@atomic_chat_hq, 2026-07-02):
> Fable 5 totally crushed our new contest, but it cost 6x more than Opus 4.8!
> We gave 4 models the same prompt: build three self-contained HTML5 canvas scenes with real physics demos
> Prompts:
> — A train derailing off a broken bridge into the water
> — Two cars jumping off ramps and colliding mid-air over a canyon
> — A monster truck crushing a row of parked cars
> Outputs:
> Fable 5: 62,158 tokens, $3.12
> GPT 5.5: 37,753 tokens, $1.14
> Opus 4.8: 22,280 tokens, $0.56
> GLM 5.2: 36,246 tokens, $0.08
> Fable 5 did all three scenes at A+. The crashes looked real, things fell and broke the right way, and nothing went through the ground or floated. GPT 5.5 was the closest to Fable. In the Bigfoot show, we think GPT was even a little better. GLM 5.2 did not win any scene, but it was the cheapest by far. Fable is the best pick for quality, but you pay more for it.
Yeah, I checked usage stats and pretty sure quota consumption on Max plan is not linear wrt to usage by API pricing. Fable burns quota faster than 2x Opus with equal token count.
Plus I'm also not super impressed; it somehow managed to implement a 200L custom TCP server for a simple static HTTP mock server for a single test case (all that was needed was a fixed route returning a fixed placeholder string) just yesterday. Never seen anything like that.