Fable May Not Be the Best Choice for Some Engineers
Fable and Opus may not be the most comfortable tools for engineers who learned to code by hand. I started thinking about this after reading Simon Willison's recent note . His point is simple: with a strong coding agent like Fable, it may be better to let the model exercise its own judgment than to spell out every condition yourself. Instead of writing detailed rules like "run tests for larger features, but not for small copy changes, except for design changes...," you can simply say: write and run tests where appropriate. The same applies to cost. Rather than deciding manually which tasks should go to which model, you can ask the agent to choose an appropriate lower-cost model and delegate the work to a subagent. Manual cars and automatics This is a rough analogy, but it feels similar to driving a car. People who enjoy driving often like manual cars. They want to choose the gear themselves. They want to feel the engine speed and have the car respond directly to their intent. For people who simply want to get somewhere, an automatic is easier. Software engineers are similar. If you have written code professionally for a long time, you usually have your own way of working. You may want to get the types right first. You may prefer small diffs. You may have a specific sense for how granular tests should be. You may even have an order in which you like to read an unfamiliar codebase. (At least, I hope you do.) For someone with that kind of style, a highly autonomous model like Fable or Opus can feel a little too automatic. The stronger the model, the more small instructions get in the way This is the same structure as management in human organizations. A junior member needs concrete instructions: read this document from this angle and summarize it in this format. A senior member can take a rougher assignment: I want to solve this problem, so investigate it, come up with an implementation plan, and move it forward. Of course this does not mean throwing work over the wall.