Fable 5.1

Anthropic released Fable 5.1 this week. My initial reaction to the release was this comment I made in the Third South Slack: More seriously: I'm excited to see the reduced cost, but have a very hazy time of describing the shape of work that Fable 5 was unable to complete, which is not to say that it didn't exist, but that it's hard to even conceptualize a step function improvement because the line between "LLM can do this" and "LLM cannot" feels so amorphous. I suspect their lack of concrete examples here is proof that this is a broader issue. Later that afternoon, I fired up 5.1 in much the same way I had fired up Fable 5 for the past few weeks, both on Conductor and, an hour or so later, on the Claude Code webface. When I fired up the webface, it prompted me -- in a full-screen modal dialog -- to try out Fable 5.1, even though Anthropic had all the information it needed to know I had already tried it out. Then, later that evening, I wanted to look at one of the long-running tasks I…