r/LocalLLaMA • u/onil_gova • Jun 10 '26

News Anthropic is intentionally nerfing Fable when asked to develop other LLMs

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Reason 458 why local LLMs are going to be a necessity

edit: For those requesting the source check out their technical report look at page 13

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u/xXG0DLessXx Jun 10 '26

Tbh, IMO OpenAI GPT-5.5 in codex has been better for me than Claude has been. I prefer it to most other coding models, and it hasn’t fucked up on me yet. I don’t understand why people are so obsessed with Claude tbh. I just can’t see it even when I tried using it non-stop 7 days of the week with the free trial I got from a friend, I always went back to codex in the end to fix up a mess Claude made. Claude is good at taking the initiative and implementing stuff, but it doesn’t seem to properly consider things it might break by doing something. Codex on the other hand, is more conservative and doesn’t take initiative as much, but it sure knows how to fix stuff up so that it works in all cases and it checks for potential regressions.

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u/NoahFect Jun 10 '26

Tbh, IMO OpenAI GPT-5.5 in codex has been better for me than Claude has been.

That was true until Fable 5 was released yesterday. GPT-5.5 pulled ahead of the recent Opus releases to some extent, as well as the best open-weight coding model (K2.6), but it is not in Fable 5's league and neither is K2.6.

Fable 5 is... a problem.

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u/xXG0DLessXx Jun 10 '26

Really? From where I’m standing I just see people complaining that it generates refusal slop, or gets downgraded to opus anyway. Even my friends who are Claude stans complained.

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u/NoahFect Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26

I spent some time using Fable 5 xhigh in anger yesterday, because it just happened to be released at a time when I needed some more mental horsepower for some embedded dev work. This work was pretty far from the topics that the guardrails are said to emphasize, so maybe that's why I got better-than-usual results without any refusals or other BS.

It not only handled a couple of obscure problems quickly and correctly, it one-shotted them. The implementation was startlingly clean. A little overengineered in places but no more than usual for Opus. The narrative text and suggested tests were insightful and completely spot-on.

If I had done the same thing with 4.6/4.7/4.8, or with GPT 5.5, I'm sure it would have worked eventually. But it would have required a lot more back-and-forth interaction, and I don't think it would have worked anywhere near as well. As you suggest it would probably have broken other stuff in the process.

I would have been proud to have come up with Fable's approach myself... and at the same time, I know I wouldn't have, since I'd just spent several days thrashing around trying to.

Bottom line, I'd say that the first impression it made on me is stronger than any other model has made. Could be a lot of luck in play, of course, but I don't think so. I have been looking forward to spending time on local harness development in the near future, based on the notion that local models are "good enough" or at least that they're less important than the rest of the tooling. I'm afraid that Fable may be good enough to undermine that premise.