alt Hacker NewsI think we put up with Fable's occasional hiccups because there's nothing better at the moment.
I use Claude Code semi-heavily for my small business, and the $100/mo I pay for that is a rounding error compared to the value it provides.
If I can avoid spending an hour or two "massaging" the output from a lower-end model once, or it avoids introducing one load-bearing (sorry, couldn't resist) bug, then that's the entire $100 right there.
Hell, you could argue that the best "coding model" that we have at the moment is the human brain, and people will gladly pay $10,000/mo for one of them.
Arguing over $20 vs $100 for something that actually puts in work just seems insane to me.
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> I think we put up with Fable's occasional hiccups because there's nothing better at the moment.
Which was an argument for using every less powerful model since the moment they got useful, right?
When was that? Opus 4.5 maybe? Let's say Opus 4.5 for the sake of the argument. So back then we were like "DeepSeek is not good enough, I need Opus 4.5". Now DeepSeek is better than Opus 4.5. So if Opus 4.5 was good enough back then, DeepSeek is better than that now.
Sure, it's always nicer to have a slightly better model. But the price difference starts mattering a lot more when all the models are already sufficiently good.
Except Fable won’t be costing $100 for enterprises that will be considering the Chinese models.
If $100 Claud Max subscription works for you, then great.
But you have to remember your pricing is subsidized by enterprises that pay hundreds of thousands of dollars each month, if not more, to Anthropic.
For those companies, a Chinese model that can cut their AI spend from $1M/month to $200k suddenly seems attractive.
And unfortunately for the American tech industry, the valuation is based off those enterprise deals, not your $100/month Claude Max subscription.
The discussion started about cost-vs-usability, and then you brought in "but humans, the best LLMs around, cost much more" into this discussion to make it a not cost-vs-usability discussion. Do you not find it a bit disingenuous?
The question low cost models will create: Why would you massage output?
Fable 5 is still going to mess things up at any sufficient complexity. The advantage of low cost models with "good enough" intelligence is they can recursively correct. Why? Because it is cheap. Proper requirements and tests and subagents take away increasing amounts of work, at a cost that is not prohibitive.
If you are reviewing code manually you might consider Fable 5 a worse option. As it articulates itself with higher confidence and you already know it is capable, you are may be more likely to miss a mistake. You know to be on guard with a junior engineer. Reviewing a senior who suddenly makes some weird stochastic mistake can be a lot harder. It would be like if the smartest human engineer you knew was capable of some random brainfart in the middle of their massive diff. Imo, much harder to deal with.
Of course, we should keep in mind Fable 5 is only expensive today. It will be cheaper in the future. Autonomous, recursive prompting and improvement is the clear end state. Especially for entities that will always have the budget for that at the SOTA frontier.