I don't use Fable for a ton of implementation work, but I use it a lot for planning, so maybe that's related to it. For planning though, I've had a very good experience with Fable and implementing with Opus.
I'd guesstimate that ~80% of the time I thought I was using Fable, I wasn't actually. It's also led me to just... not even try, and just start with Opus regardless.
I've found Fable unusable; not because it's bad, but because it... can't be used.
FWIW, most of my code only encounters security concepts as standard implementation of best practices. I'm not in a security centric position.
“sure thing boss”
——
“Hey Fable, review this unsafe win32 rust code”
“Potentially dangerous request, falling back to Opus”
—-
Every damn time, ironic because the unsafe win32 code can be generated by fable in the same session.
Maddening.
We have access to Fable at our company on our enterprise plans and most of us rarely run into an issue.
Obviously this is gonna vary a lot with what technical domain you work in which is why its important when talking about the classifiers that people specify exactly what types of workloads they were seeing failures with.
It did help with some worldbuilding for my book (it wasn't incredible which gives me some hope for writers). So far opus 4.8 is the most reasonable model.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5ee49718-c258-4f01-aa32-7e5b76ae5...
Ironically one of their demos is speeding up inference - do us normies get to do that with Anthropic tech??
About a month or two ago, they must have tightened the black list on bio topics as it became more willing to process requests without visibly downgrading to Opus.
I get punted down to Opus 5 occasionally (for security-adjacent things) but that's pretty rare.
I do think probably ralph looping a binary locally first is going to be best to get 100% recovery of types and function behaviors then letting a smarter model churn the final steps.
In general, if Fable isn't blocking you, there's a high chance a lower tier model would work fine.
I have noticed sometimes it likes to gaslight itself into thinking that everything its doing is allowed or allowable, I saw that it thought the game I was reverse engineering was running on a private server (it was not) so it assumed it had permission to do anything lol.
And the lack of thought traces make it utterly useless.