I'm doing work with fairly complicated cryptographic algorithms and math. I'm finding Fable 5 to be a significant stop better than Opus 4.8, but that Opus occasionally comes up with something small but nontrivial that Fable missed. (The reverse is true much more often.)
That's the delta in our use cases then, I suppose. I'm not doing anything super novel. DevOps work, web application development — things that typically do not stump the agent(s) when given time to iterate.
Yeah, I've learned that it's only worth deploying Fable for the most challenging problems. For a while, my Fable workflow was looking like ths:
Me: Hey Fable, I've got this massive, theoretically challenging, totally novel, ill-defined cutting-edge problem that I'd like you to solve.
Fable: < Doesn't merely solve the problem -- utterly obliterates it. Nukes it from orbit. Does a robust one-shot that takes several hours to complete. >
Me: Holy smokes, that was amazing!!!! But the formatting could use some simple refinements. Could you change the margins and maybe add a drop-cap at the start of each section in the user docs?
Fable: < Commences another multi-hour nuclear exchange with the code >
Me: WT?!?!
(The moral of this story is that bringing a nuke to a knife-fight is only occasionally the best strategy. And in more practical terms: Fable is amazing -- but only for certain classes of problems, and even if it were free there's a lot I probably wouldn't use it for.
