Fable and the End of the Free Lunch

The release of Anthropic's Fable model marks a turning point: the era of cheap, ever-improving AI coding is over. As Moore's Law once did for hardware, new models used to paper over inefficiencies in our coding workflows. But Fable's high cost—and its stringent data policies—have forced developers to reconsider where to allocate their work. The author now uses Fable for design and interrogation, then hands off to cheaper models like GLM 5.2 for routine coding, a strategy that may persist even as prices fall.