Just because the Chinese are running export controls in one market doesn't mean that they're going to close of access to AI. They might, but each market should be considered in isolation.
They’re falling back to Opus 4.8. Most people weren’t using Fable for everything anyway because it’s so expensive.
None of open weights models are even at Opus 4.8 levels. If someone was using Fable they don’t have any second best alternative outside of Anthropic.
More stuff done per dollar or more stuff done for more dollars? Seems to be an important distinction
Fable was definitely better for a variety of tasks, even accounting for using 2X the token rate, like the way it used the tokens faster reduced the wasted tokens, as least for the subset of those who already knew at least some optimizations...?
Or they were getting silently rerouted and couldn't realise they weren't using Fable
GPT-5.5 isn't awful.
It's not racist or even politically incorrect in the US, it's a common saying.
Friends Don't Let Friends Use Ollama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788385
I have decently capable hardware, but stuff like Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 still doesn't compare to agentic editing with a frontier model. Right now, OpenCode's $10/mo "Go" plan is what I'd be looking to try once my year expires.
Enjoy.
Don't get me wrong, I use it, it's fast-smart-and affordable. But not suitable for all tasks.
Opus 4.6+ is able to make slow progress, but it takes several revisions per workstream. It requires constant supervision as it often creates convoluted solutions that expand the code in bloated ways. It works, but still requires my constant input.
Fable was able to almost one shot most of the big migrations with very few bugs, and was able to fix those bugs with 1 review pass. I almost didn't believe it. I was able to put it on a task (with dangerous permissions) and come back hours later to see it done, working, and clean.
I tried DeepSeek v4 and it wasn't able to make any meaningful progress at all. It kept creating dangling pointers and had trouble understanding the inline assempbly needed to be replaced if we were to compile for 64 bit. It kept getting stuck and looping on the same problem, without making progress.
What I do use DeepSeek for is lots of my automations on my websites. I find DeepSeek is fantastically cheap and fast and effective as summarization, collation, generating reports, finding and reporting issues from logs, etc. But I haven't found a way to get it to effectively port 90's C++ code to modern, cross-platform standards. But I want to be clear- I really like DeepSeek and use it wherever I can.. I mean.. it's so affordable!
Then I had deepseek summarize the bug, gave it to Opus, and it solved it in $1.12 and five minutes.
Found just later I was using v4 flash and not pro (for mistakenly setting the model to deepseek-chat and not v4-pro).
There are aspects about Deepseek I don't like though, when pushed against it will eagerly bend instead of reasoning and advocating for his points, something Opus 4.7 and later models started doing a lot (even when wrong).
And it works, because the American market is generally more important than the markets of these countries 9 times out of 10.
It's tough, US technologies are everywhere but they are only liabilities. Microsoft is the stickiest of all.
They have pioneered and been very influential in different aspects of LLM engineering and research, while also publishing in the open.
You would not have Fable 5 as good as it is without Chinese work.
A House committee also recently probed Cursor and Airbnb for using Chinese models, rather than more expensive American alternatives. A sexagenarian Congressman gave a nonsense quote that he certainly did not come up with himself,[1] which sounds very similar to language Anthropic uses in its marketing materials.[2][3]
[1] https://www.semafor.com/article/04/29/2026/house-committee-p...
[2] https://www.anthropic.com/news/updating-restrictions-of-sale...
That's not really a threat model described in either of the Anthropic posts you share, which mainly talk about the risks of allowing authoritarian regimes to use powerful US-trained models, and the geopolitical risks of authoritarian countries developing strong AI before democratic/liberal countries do.
> We need to ensure America has leading open models founded on American values. Open- source and open-weight models could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research worldwide. For that reason, they also have geostrategic value. While the decision of whether and how to release an open or closed model is fundamentally up to the developer, the Federal government should create a supportive environment for open models.
If I need to upgrade, the plan start at $6, so its a no brainer.
It's definitely not as good. But it's also definitely good enough.
What's your DSv4 setup? What harness? It sounds like I should give it another try!
I mostly do C# and some frontend. I was starting to feel really depressed and unengaged at work because I was starting to use AI far too much like a magic slot machine. I'm now making a conscious effort to go back to using it as a tool used a bit more deliberately.
I'm not even using the pro model. The flash version is fast so I can keep it interactive rather than context switching to reddit while the model is working, and it turns out using my brain means I don't really need the model to be that smart.
I spent about $1.5 this week.