Fable and the End of the Free Lunch

There’s immoderate talk coming astir really agentic coders are balking astatine Anthropic’s pricing and adopting alternatives. I was reminded of a thought I had successful the weeks pursuing Fable’s release: the free luncheon was over.

When Moore’s Law was successful effect, it didn’t make consciousness to ruthlessly optimize your code. In 18 months, a CPU would get that would double your performance. Herb Sutter famously referred to this as, “the free lunch,” successful a seminal essay.

When Moore’s Law slowed successful the mid-2000s (specifically, single-threaded capacity stagnated), we abruptly had to deliberation astir parallelization, architecture, representation locality, etc.

We had to deliberation astir what activity went where.

Prior to Fable, it felt silly to discarded too overmuch clip improving your coding harness aliases discourse strategies. A caller exemplary would get astatine the aforesaid value (or cheaper!) and insubstantial complete astir of your problems.

But past Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible. But the costs was truthful precocious and Opus was good enough (as was 5.6, K3, and moreover GLM) for most of the codification we needed.

So we started to deliberation astir what activity went where.

GLM 5.2 is worthy focusing on. It came retired the aforesaid week arsenic Fable and is astir 1/9th the costs (and ~1/5th the costs of Opus 5). Is GLM 1/9th the value of Fable? Perhaps, for definite classes of tasks. But for astir rote coding it’s much than sufficient. Especially erstwhile provided pinch awesome context. I often chat pinch Fable to interrogate and style a design, earlier handing disconnected a little to GLM.

I get pushback that falling conclusion prices will yet bring america backmost to sending everything done the largest models. But I’m not truthful sure: those aforesaid gains will use the K3s and Qwens, and arsenic we continue to create amended harnesses it will beryllium easier to supply weaker (but still great) models pinch capable discourse to execute well.

Plus, Fable’s other daze apt locks successful this change. Fable’s entree controls, move degradation, and required information retention spooked capable companies (and countries!) into reasoning astir wherever they nonstop their traces and wherever they get their tokens.