Comment by scronkfinkle
14 hours ago
Has anyone been able to get anything substantial done with Fable in the first place? I more or less had totally given up on using it since the alignment checks were so sensitive that it pretty much always threw me back to Opus.
I hear this a lot and I believe it because I've heard it from so many people, but I have never run into this in my work, and neither has anyone I know in real life.
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 don't mean to sound like I'm dismissing your experience, but are you sure? I've (semi regularly, most of the time I'm even trying to use Fable) started with Fable, proceeded through my planning, and then at some point in the future realized it had kicked me back to Opus without me knowing. It obviously _said_ it had happened, but I didn't realize and just continued. This might primarily be a result of the project I'm working on (anything network related seems to gets kicked back).
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.
No that's totally fair - I want to say that I haven't, but I guess I really can't be sure. It's very possible. I'll keep an eye out for the next time I use Fable.
FWIW, most of my code only encounters security concepts as standard implementation of best practices. I'm not in a security centric position.
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“Hey Fable, write me some win32 unsafe rust code”
“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.
Yep. Fable implemented 2FA login. Declined to review own code in same session.
Do your apps do anything with security? I can't hardly use Fable on our authentication service because it constantly trips up and refuses to write tests. Even just doing a security review usually triggers opus.
I do very security cyber dangerous work like building a signup/login form or setting up a certificate. For obvious and good reasons Fable refuses to work on such sensitive stuff.
I couldn't even get Fable to build my auth endpoints at all!
I agree and wonder whether its either people who basically never use the model complaining or people who used it once a long time ago and haven't touched it since.
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.
You can easily trip it up if you're doing reverse engineering work. From memory, the moment Fable 5 saw anything loosely related to "linux seccomp" it threw a fit.
From my experience, any time Fable sees anything loosely related to "linux" it throws a fit.
No, almost anything related to my job is flagged for "cyber" and my company currently has no plan to try and enroll into mythos. I'm not sure if anyone has been able to enroll solo.
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.
I heard the only way you are going to get into the CVP program is if you have public CVEs. Doesn't seem to matter if you are in a company account or not according to people that are supposedly in the program.
Thank you, that's actually helpful. I thought it was only accessible through a b2b agreement with Anthropic.
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Yes, I used it to do a big push of my self-maintaining project All I need next is to push it through enough cycles to trust it (I have high confidence based on results so far) and then I can just setup a cron to do routine maintenance on my project
You don't seem to be alone: FT.com: Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive. AI lab’s Fable 5 has met with sluggish demand from corporate clients [1]
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/5ee49718-c258-4f01-aa32-7e5b76ae5...
Same. Both times I tried it was adamant that I can only use opus. I was reworking my company content (financial services) and it was not helpful.
Combo of that, laziness and load-bearing language + the penchant for making up weird dense conceptual names pushed me to sol 5.6. They seem to indicate it is a less annoying writer in the announcement so I’m curious to try it out, though.
Ironically one of their demos is speeding up inference - do us normies get to do that with Anthropic tech??
Useless for reverse-engineering the software that talks to a ten-year-old video cam + DVR system I was given, really nice for things I actually do in my day job (web dev at an agency).
For a long time, no - it was completely unusually for my work that references biological information about migratory birds/other (innocuous) seasonal phenomena.
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've used Fable for so much stuff. My experience has been that it can pretty much one-shot most of my complex problems, if I describe them clearly and provide a solid way for it to verify its work.
I get punted down to Opus 5 occasionally (for security-adjacent things) but that's pretty rare.
[dead]
It's probably a good model for folks doing basic software stuff, or humanities related tasks, but I work in cybersecurity on the defense/detections side and I haven't been able to use it for anything even with being in the CVP. It downgrades to Opus every time.
I have been running Fable with Binary Ninja MCP. It will reverse engineer a binary in a lot of detail if you give it mild direction and I haven't had it flag. I think it assumes since I have a valid binja license I must be responsible lol.
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.
Fable is way too expensive for basic software stuff. Other models are more than good enough for that.
In general, if Fable isn't blocking you, there's a high chance a lower tier model would work fine.
The only problems Opus struggles with, Fable won't take on. I was porting some software from Win32 to linux. Opus was running in circles. Fable was going great until it saw some authentication code and bailed.
In my experience, the guards are less strict than they were at first. When Fable came out, it dropped back to Opus 4.8 for about 50% of my prompts. Now it's maybe 20%.
Most of the work I've done with pgrust hasn't had issues with Fable. The only time I've had issues is when building a fuzz tester to find bugs
When fable first released it was almost useless. Since then, it's improved a lot. It has been working on my binary ninja MCP server just fine. It flagged for cyber 1 time (no idea why), but it generally works 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.
Nope. Always failed within 2-3 prompts. The most basic REST service you can imagine. Cookies are signed, that's crypto, banned. Completely useless model.
I have used it to write some scripts but it is incredibly expensive.
Nope.
And the lack of thought traces make it utterly useless.
I successfully used it to re-slop Claude slop from 1+ year ago. Really puts things into perspective.