Speaking for a user-facing use, not autonomous coding or agentic workflows: Fable 5.1 choice of words and general “words salad” expression are horrific. It starts not so good, then as the context grows (still way below any reasonable rotting threshold) it gets completely insane. It’s pointless for a model to be extremely capable if it gives you brain damage. I don’t know if it’s because of the watermark thingy, all I know is it gives me pure rage flares and every time I give it a shot I regret it. And there is no way to steer it away from this, anything I tried, both instructions and harness-wise, either failed or got forgotten/ignored after a while. I really hope the next Fable class moves completely away from whatever they did there to cause this.

Opus 5.5 in comparison is a bit more verbose and appears to settle on evaluations before the depth reached by Fable on very complex stuff, but is still vastly capable and I can read its output without wishing it had a physical form I could punch in the face.

I only use Fable when "knowing about more stuff" is important (like research, exploring ideas), but I find Opus 5.5 writes and expresses itself more clearly and is reliable for anything I throw at it, so I use it much more.

It's possible Fable is better, but since it word salads more quickly, it's hard to tell.

I find Fable 5.1 output to be borderline unreadable. Opus 5.5 on the other hand has been a pleasure to work with.

I've found its worse in most tasks, especially when ranked on a cost-per-task metric.

Fable 5.1 is good for better knowledge and tasks that require a more meticulous output, and it's objectively better at design and mockups IMO, but I rarely resort to it outside of that.

I generally use Fable for high-level blueprinting, architecture, and technical planning, and I tell it to write most of its documentation in a way Opus 5.5 will understand and maximally benefit from; with the added prompt for Opus to concede when a task would be better off to bring Fable back in. I've had ZERO problems.

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