My thoughts on Fable

what I want from a harness

Jul 07, 2026

Hey folks,

I’ve been using Fable quite a bit since it came back (but not for long…) and I’ve barely used it to do any building. I like Anthropic’s models mostly for their thinking, they’re resourceful, creative and can connect things I often can’t put my finger on.

So Fable’s been a bit of a therapist/thinking partner this past week. But it feels slightly different this time. It could be me, but it has shown me a bunch of Opus-like traits in how it’s talking or thinking. And it’s not because my prompts are being routed to Opus (I checked).

I’m excited to see GPT 5.6 come out, I think this week, to see if they’ve finally cracked the creativity/thinking vibe I’m after. Codex is a materially better product than Claude Code (or Cowork). And it’s super fast.

As usual, I’m using a square peg for a round hole - a coding agent with a coding brain for creative thinking and brainstorming. But I do change the system prompt of Claude Code to a simpler one that is much faster and much less steered.

I’m wanting a harness that can still build but is less of a developer at heart, and more something to really spar with me on creative thinking. I sometimes flit to plain Claude for different perspectives, but that doesn’t seem to cut it either.

I’ve tried skills, prompts, and harnesses but nothing seems to get me what I want. Which is something I keep thinking through when I want to make something…what do I actually want?! Today that question comes up for me a lot, and I keep convincing myself I’ll only know when I see it, so I need to stay ‘in the work’ before it’ll present itself.

But equally, this could be AI having an impact on me - if anything can be generated at any moment, just cycle through until you see what you want. Just keep spinning that wheel.

Seems healthy? 😅

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Headlines

Today is the last day of Fable being available in your Claude subscriptions (atleast for now). You will have to buy usage credits for using Fable starting tomorrow. So everyone has a guide to get the max out of this one day:
- Use Fable to find your unknowns - Thariq (from Anthropic)
- Let Fable use its judgement - Simon Willison
I’ve mostly used a single long chat with Fable this entire week. The way it uses memory, compaction, and writing to files is amazing. I’m making it use codex and droid as subagents A LOT. So much that I’m running out on my Codex usage faster than my Claude Code usage. — Keshav
Theo’s video on how he has used Fable is a good watch to reimagine how you should use the newer generation of AI models, because remember, GPT-5.6-Sol will likely become accessible this week. You can expect similar performance/behaviour from that one.
The Information reported that OpenAI has found a way to cut its inference cost in half and already tested it on logged-out ChatGPT users. Does this mean it can reduce API costs of their latest models too? Not sure, but I hope it is. The last major price cut we had was about a year ago, when OpenAI reduced the cost of o3 by 80%.
GPT-Realtime-2.1-mini - new model in the OpenAI API that can take in video and output audio while doing reasoning and tool calls.
MIRA is a playable world model trained on 10k hours of Rocket League-style gameplay. It feels like you’re actually playing the game on low-graphics with janky controls.
New interpretability research from Anthropic - Claude uses a global workspace to activate a bunch of concepts that don’t appear in the output or the chain of thought but affect its work. The researchers are comparing it to unconscious thoughts.