Claude Fable 5 Backlash Grows

Fable has been a hit or miss for me. It fixed a couple of my Github repos with specialized R packages for uncommon econometrics methods where Opus 4.8 had failed. However, for many apparently mundane requests, it just reverted to Opus.

Anecdotal, but working on a biodiversity-related project has made Fable completely useless to me. It sends literally everything to Opus immediately because it’s related to biology. No word from Anthropic since I sent feedback, so I won’t bother relying on it and I don’t plan to.

I get that it’s biology and there are potential risks in that field, but this is stuff like making sure the name of a worm exists in a database or coordinates where the worm was seen are valid. Fable won’t even inspect the purpose, though.

I totally understand the US admin played a significant role here. I don’t think it was the only role, though. I also think the classifier is way too crude. I doubt I could do better on short notice, or perhaps it’s due to external constraints entirely. Considering the cash my organization dumps on them, we hoped for better. Such a disappointment. We’re all pretty leery now and investigating other models.

I actually posted praising Fable’s code review quality when it first debuted, and someone accused me of being an LLM (ha). This new version gets no praise whatsoever, though. It’s such a contrast.

Fable is utterly useless these days. Just good at burning tokens.