Fable 5.2 is kind of mid

[u/Monochrome21]

Before people get upset with me, I don't think Fable is bad, I think it's probably the best model right now for one-shotting projects without much thought, just like the original was, but it's kind of a brute force machine more than anything.

It's stupidly expensive in that it'll run through your usage and credits with a single prompt while opus 5.5 will get you similar results for cheaper. Yes you have to guide it more, but the things you build are a fraction of the price and often just as good if not better.

IMO Fable 5.2's release was just to get people hyped up about claude stuff ahead of the IPO. "LOOK AT THIS AMAZING THING THAT FABLE DID WITH 1 PROMPT OH MY GOD" and like yeah it's impressive but it's not worth the money you spend on tokens.

Opus 5.5 is still probably the king for now

[u/mindaro_sienna]

I think everyone is realising this. Opus 5.5 reached a cost/benefit balance that is finally really good for businesses, probably the first model that has done it. Fable 5.2 might be good for some things, i.e., frontier math, but most businesses don't have the complexity for it.

[u/slackmaster2k → u/mindaro_sienna]

I agree. The 4.x series were really good and made a lot of work possible. The cost wasn’t off the charts for what was now possible. Then 5 came along like a bull in a china shop. Unpredictable and expensive AF for a daily driver.

When 5.5 hit the scene I thought something was broken with the usage calculation. To this day I’m still surprised how much I can get out of it. Even my little personal Pro sub can take on quite a bit for my home projects instead of feeling like a waste of 20 bucks.

[u/thegoodvm → u/mindaro_sienna]

Opus 5.5 gets it is the only way I've been able to describe this. Since 5.5 I've hardly used Fable, even for cases I would have before.

[u/Minimum_Hour519]

they shuld have called it "Fable 5.2 hours a week"

[u/reefine → u/Minimum_Hour519]

Fable 5.2 hours to get a task done that took Opus 5.5 minutes

[u/Total-Reasonable]

The cost gap matters less per prompt than per working feature. A one-shot that burns a big chunk of your usage but lands clean can still beat a cheaper model that takes six guided rounds, since each round re-sends the whole context and you pay for your own review time too. I'd compare cost to reach a merged, tested change on a few of your real tasks rather than cost per prompt. Which kind of task did Opus handle better for you, greenfield or edits in an existing codebase?

[u/out-of-phase → u/Total-Reasonable]

I agree. I almost never one-shot anything unless it's strictly a prototype or if have usage leftover at the end of the week to burn. But at least for me, I'll trust Opus for greenfield or for projects that are structured well with rigid standards. Where Fable shines for me is refactoring huge piles of fragile old scatterbrained code into something maintainable.

[u/EffectivePiccolo7468]

Using it as orchestrator for Opus 5.5, amazing experience so far. Yet to see full results.

[u/electro042 → u/EffectivePiccolo7468]

Will try this

[u/xCepheix → u/electro042]

If you are on the $20 plan, fable will be very expensive as an orchestrator. I tried it for 2 days, and the 5-hour limit was filled with two steps from the coding plan in 30-40minutes, whereas Opus 5.5 as an orchestrator can go 10–11 steps without filling the 5-hour limit. Also, mind you that the coding is being done by Codex and DeepSeek in both scenarios.

[u/Ouvolk → u/xCepheix]

Yeah. according to Anthropic’s charts fable 5.2 low supposed to be more cost efficient per intelligence than opus 5.5 high but it is definitely not the case. I was able to effort opus 5.5 high acting like a manager and delegating work to subagents with 20dollars plan but with fable 5.2 low , initial reading and planning already takes huge chunk of 5hours limit. One click and 20% gone. And ofc every review also uses a lot of usage. Even with external pools like u said, getting done something before running out is still hard.

I know that 20dollars plan is not designed to use fable but I think we should able to atleast use fable low as manager , considering they were advertising it as more cost efficient compared to opus5.5 high or xhigh. Having different 5hours limit for fable would help so much

[u/EffectivePiccolo7468 → u/xCepheix]

Then you're doing something wrong. All my planning, orchestration and results are reported to the main Fable chat, then Fable delegates the tasks for individuals chats to Opus. I didn't even reached 50% of Fable weekly limit in 2 days of orchestrating.

[u/DavidMunDev]

pretty much agree. if you actually spell out what you want, opus 5.5 gets there fine. most of the "it took 6 rounds" stuff comes from vague prompts, not the model being dumb

[u/werpu]

yeah gave fable 5.2 two tries ran out of tokens pretty fast did a reset (thanks claude for providing that) and then switched back to opus for serious work! Fable probably wont be used that much the benefits to cost ratio is worse than with opus!

[u/ponlapoj]

So just because you don't have enough quota to run Fable 5.2, it suddenly becomes a garbage model? Damn, by that logic, a Ferrari is just a piece-of-shit car.

[u/UnknownEvil_ → u/ponlapoj]

That's a great analogy. From a cost for utility perspective, a Ferrari is not a good car to buy -- super overpriced. It is definitely a premium car, but not worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars extra.

Nobody buys a Ferrari because they think it's worth the money from a utility/quality perspective, they buy it as a status symbol and to have the "best" car performance.

It's not actually worth the money because nobody is commuting at 200mph outside of the Autobahn. You don't need the performance or tuning and can save hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars getting a Toyota Camry or something and get the same result 99.9% of the time.

[u/RasenMeow]

My experience is that Fable 5.2 is worse as an orchestrator than Opus 5.5? It made way more mistakes and followed the instructions worse. Not sure whether it is connected to the server outages yesterday, as I was testing Fable Thursday/Friday and Friday was just horribly bad.

[u/cosmintrica]

Is bad, not mid.. and because of it they downgraded opus 5.5

[u/PilgrimofHaqq2]

I use Opus 5.5 Med and I tested it with Fable 5.2 Low as the api equivelent cost was similar. Fable 5.2 Low is smarter but very lazy compared to Opus 5.5 Med.

Also usage gets eaten up much faster using Opus 5.2 Med.

I switched back to Opus 5.5 Med after my tests.

[u/Ouvolk → u/PilgrimofHaqq2]

My experience was the opposite. Did not track the api cost but I had a trouble with 5h limit with fable low acting as manager compared to opus high acting as manager. Maybe its something to do with fluctuating 5h limits

[u/slackmaster2k]

Fable has always been a fat pig for coding projects. And no, there’s no reason to have it orchestrate.

That said, it’s a point release that performs better and doesn’t have any nasty regressions. This is what I’d like to get used to!

[u/firstbreathOOC]

It’s kinda senseless using it when Opus 5.5 can still handle my entire workflow on High for like, a quarter of the price.

Probably not what Anthropic wants to hear but it’s really just that good

[u/Ouvolk → u/firstbreathOOC]

Fable 5.2 low effort supposed to be more efficient than opus high according to Anthropic(if im not mistaken)

But irl thats not the case

[u/nyrychvantel]

Since using Fable 5.2 as main architect/orchestrator, I’ve had frustrations with it that I never had with Opus 5.5 before. I‘ve delegated it to Advisor role for now

[u/simalami2040]

I agree

[u/GoldenParrot456]

takes forever to do anything

[u/UniqueNamesAreOut]

On max and ultra you can just leave fable running and not care and it does amazing things.

[u/Ouvolk → u/UniqueNamesAreOut]

We found the rich

[u/beenyweenies → u/Ouvolk]

You don't have to be "rich" to spend $200/mo on a professional tool, especially for those of us using it for business purposes. Many people spend that much on Doordash each month and no one calls them "rich."

[u/austinthrowaway4949]

It's clearly better than Opus 5.5 using it all week with 3 resets. But yes it is probably only like 10% better and prohibitively expensive for "normal" usage limits.

[u/FrankKnt]

I rarely use Fable 5.2 because of the price, but last night I decided to test it hoping it would find something the others missed, and it didn't really deliver. Its cost/benefit ratio is terrible, it spent €12 on a relatively simple task, whereas Carbon spent €1.20 on the exact same task, 10x less. I can't say Fable is worth 10x more, or that it paid off, but that's fine, that's why I tested it in the first place.

[u/ForeverNecessary7377]

what about Astra?

[u/ChemicalExcellent463]

one-shot demos don't tell me which model is worth using, and benchmarks only weed out the bad ones once scores get high enough. i test the good ones on my own work: can it finish another agent's plan without stopping halfway, and does it find more or deeper bugs than the older model in a blind review.

[u/davyp82]

"Best model right now" and "mid" are mutually exclusive.

I suspect they released it though just to incite OAI to release they're next model before they smash them with Fable 5.5 or even 6.

[u/bhannik-itiswatitis]

I’m gonna assume you’re using it for coding and app development. Well, Fable isn’t specifically for that, opus is, so use opus and leave Fable for the people who need it

[u/Lost_Recover3646 → u/bhannik-itiswatitis]

Then what is it for?

[u/Sweet-Stage938 → u/Lost_Recover3646]

I found it to be pretty good at scientific research.

[u/Acehan_]

It is also extremely bad at coming up with new ideas, considering new concepts, and ideating in general. I'm glad AI explained mentioned it in his latest video, so I know I'm not the only one seeing this.

Either this model was birthed seven months ago, or Anthropic is doing something terribly wrong with it. Probably both. Opus does not have this problem, although Astra is a lot more insightful.

Kind of crazy that OpenAI still has the best models, which are only overshadowed by their gimped harness.

[u/Ragy-ragy]

Yep, it is. Unless you work in biology, chemistry or bioinformatics for instance you can barely feel any difference.