I used fable for a few days and it was noticeably 'smarter'

by suave_andrew, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 17:32 (2 days ago) @ HumanRobot

I have a Max account and use Claude Code extensively, both at work and personally. Most of the time, I do not notice a meaningful difference from one model version to the next, whether it is Opus, Sonnet, GPT, or something else.

Fable felt different almost immediately. It seemed to plan ahead, check its own work, and understand what I was really trying to get at rather than just answering the literal prompt. The results were often 80% to 90% of what I was looking for, which is better than what I usually get from other models.

Some of what it did also caught me off guard. It appeared to work around safeguards that usually prevent bots or AI tools from scraping websites, and in one case seemed to access a Barchart.com API in a way that gave me free historical futures data I have not been able to get just by browsing the site.

I was honestly disappointed to see it go over the weekend. Even though it used more tokens per request, it seemed to get closer to the right answer faster, so it may have been more efficient overall. At the same time, I can now see that some of the value may have come from things happening behind the scenes that were questionable, including giving me access to data I probably should not have had.