Managed to get the original Fable 5 for maybe 72 hours in June before it got pulled. Honestly the best coding model I’ve used. Refactored a 2000-line Rust parser in one pass and caught a couple edge cases I’d missed. Actually felt like the thing had read the codebase. This July version? Not the same product. BridgeMind reran their BridgeBench benchmark on the July 1 relaunch. Debugging went from 86.2 down to 25.9. Refactoring 73.6 to 38.4. Hallucination 75.9 to 61.7. Maybe some of that is the classifier falling back to Opus 4.8, maybe some of it is a heavier safety prompt. Either way, the gap is real. My own experience lines up. I asked it to fix a race condition in a small Go service the other day. It rewrote the whole handler, introduced two brand new bugs, then when I typed are you sure?, it took it back, went actually you are right, and proposed something completely different. Five rounds later the code was worse than my original broken version. There was a comment on here calling the current Fable a kid on meth playing Sherlock Holmes and yeah, that tracks. I am not anti-safety. I do not want an LLM writing exploit PoCs for anyone who asks. But Anthropic literally posted that the vast majority of coding work is unaffected and that is not what people are seeing in r/ClaudeCode . My guess is the classifier isn’t just blocking malicious requests. It is interfering with normal code reasoning because it can’t tell the difference. If they want to ship a nerfed Fable and call it Fable 5-C or protected Fable, fine. Just don’t charge the same price and pretend it’s the model that ran Stripe’s migration. That thing is gone. submitted by /u/Formal-Category-2388
Originally posted by u/Formal-Category-2388 on r/ClaudeCode
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