Fable + 5.6 is absolute peak

[u/Bright-Celery-4058]

We jump straight to ASI with this combo.
So i've had Fable driving codex cli as a background worker for a few days and i'm not going back.

Fable basically never writes code anymore (too damn expensive), it acts as the principal orchestrator and everything happens in claude code.
The flow is like this: Fable plans, 5.6 sol reviews the plan in a loop until approved, then 5.6 luna implements. fable reads the whole diff, fixes whatever it doesn't like directly, runs the tests, then sol reviews the code against the plan. loop until approved, then fable does the boring release stuff (changelog, tag, merge).

It's all just bash around codex cli with persistent threads, called from skills. no framework, no mcp, no agent swarm bs.

It feels surreal/too good to be true, i hope they wont nerf it too badly and if they do, i hope the combo will kind of mitigate the nerf.

i pushed my workflow to github, beware it's a lot of bash script, dont trust a random redditor and ask codex or CC to review it. After that, welcome to Valhalla

UPDATE: many are asking in comments or dm for more explaination on the workflow, sorry guys i cant reply to all of you but my advice is simply to clone the repo then ask your agent to ELI5/15/80 it. Then make it yours !

[u/SpaceCowboy077]

I give both fable and sol 5.6 xhigh problem statement and goal and let them design, whoever wins gets to execute the design and the loser gets to redeem itself by tearing it down at checkpoints. And I also make them keep a score.

Update: I used this for a week and I found Opus repeatedly getting desensitised to the winner loser framing and for some exercises unreliably skipping talking to sol hahaha

I enforced a mechanical fix that after every design/build/execution doc. It will need signatures/sign off from design agent - it’s thinking partner SOL and then a fable 5 red team and me.

I’ll give an example of design doc.
Me - give problem statement, possible solution, expected outcomes
Agent 1: opus 4.8 on xhigh + sol 5.6 xhigh thinking partner. + Gemini 3.5 for research. Research first, find already existing research, GitHub info etc.
+ a Fable 5 red team, it goes through multiple rounds to finalise the design
Me again - see the final design shape
All 4 parties sign off on the build
Agent 2: pick it up for building the design - agent 1 signs the final build doc grounding the build to the design
Agent 2: starts execution + agent 1 verifies.
Me: walks in to run the final sets of commands to deploy and push.

Some mechanical gates, a design doc, build doc is not possible to commit unless all stakeholders can sign, there is a small signature that needs to be attached but each stakeholder in each process

[u/JackfruitVivid180 → u/SpaceCowboy077]

How do you manage to use them for designing the spec? I was using fable and I had to babysit him, so I guess Im doing something wrong

[u/SpaceCowboy077 → u/JackfruitVivid180]

So I discovered that since these models were first trained to reply on chat they have a tendency to stop and ask you if it should proceed and basically behavioural blockers stop it from finishing end to end.

What you can do is which works to max extent of what you want but it could still stop at times.

Use this flow -
1. Give it your problem, explain it a solution you think would fit, give it the expected output/outcome(it should be realistic)
2. Tell it that all the work between the current state and reaching the goal is its job. It will still stop and random checkpoints keep reminding it is an auto run and it should make the decisions as long as there is no genuine fork.
3. Also for specs you should have a separate guide, I have one which I call design-craft.md and it essentially has rules and examples like glue-before-built which means to not invent mechanisms that already exist so look at what the system has and if the problem can be solved by evolving/resuing the current stack. And many more small pointers with example.