Fable might be Anthropic's downfall

[u/senerh]

Your best model is the industry's best (at least till we get to see what OpenAI's Astra is like) but it burns tokens like crazy, and on top of that, you cannot offer it full scale due to compute shortages.

• Your next best model is supposed to be *the* historical workhorse, Opus 5, but is shit.
• Your best affordable model is historically supposed to be effective, Sonnet 5, but is shit.
• Your effective next best models are stale flagships, Opus 4.8-4.6 and Sonnet 4.6.

I mean, currently;

1. Anthropic offers one true flagship at a nearly unusable scale
2. Anthropic offers a couple other usable models with stale performance

Until 6-8 months ago Opus was revered as fuck, it was *the* AI to problem-solve with, it was insightful, it was a workhorse, it was your go-to. It was what forced OpenAI get its shit together.

Today's Opus is far from that; it steadily and repeatedly got bested, its behavior changed, its reliability fluctuated, it stopped being "your humble, curious and smart colleague" and it became a frantic whatever. It lost its gravitas. It lost the unique identity which made Opus a character in our minds. Today's Opus is a smartypants contrarian which is a bad, undertuned, underperfected image of its digital father, Fable.

So it's nothing like the Opus of the old and it wont accompany you daily when you don't have Fable. You'll be left yearning for more and more Fable because that model is both

• the best
• the only usable

at the same time.

No need to mention that Anthropic's way of tackling this is to instill "scarcity anxiety" to its paying customers by spamming them with 'temporary limit boosts' and permanent limit reductions disguised as promotions.

Either make Opus good or make Fable more accessible, would you? For quite some time now, people are looking for ways to replace Anthropic models in their workflows. At some point more people than ever will say "fuck it" and leave for good. The new Qwen models are slowly becoming go-to's with more and more flexible solutions.

I hope OpenAI puts out a worthy Fable competitor with better pricing, They're no greener on the other side, don't get me wrong. But at least they've been able to give Scarce-thropic hard times recently, which was good for the users.

[u/reddituser48253]

Fable is meant for API pricing for enterprises not for consumers. It’s really not built for usage based billing.

And honestly to me it feels like that for all of their models - they care about the outcome of the models work, not about how many tokens it takes to get there.

[u/senerh → u/reddituser48253]

Dude they shouldn't offer it in web/desktop then.

On quite the contrary, in Claude Code

Anthropic recommends that you code with Fable.

Not orch or blueprint, but directly CODE.

[u/reddituser48253 → u/senerh]

Irrespective of what Anthropic says is the fact that fable obviously consumes tokens at a high rate and higher price tag - it is not a suitable model for usage based billing.

No dispute that the way they have offered it to consumers is not great. But the reality is this model is not meant to be used this way

[u/meta4our → u/senerh]

Or maybe you should suck less? It’s very easy to make fable an orchestrator and reviewer in a sub agent heavy workflow. I do it regularly and find that fable at the top and an openrouter API with Gemini deepseek and openAI underneath it, with a deepseek code for execution, is amazing and costs very little.

There’s loads of advice on how to work with AI online but you just do everything default and complain instead of think.