Quoting Drew Breunig
Fable's high cost ends the era of relying on new models to cheaply solve engineering problems
“Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems.”
Drew Breunig observes that Fable's release marks the end of the 'free lunch' in AI development, where developers could coast on ever-cheaper, ever-better models arriving to paper over inefficiencies. Fable is exceptional but expensive, while Opus and alternatives are good enough for most code tasks, forcing developers to actively route work by model tier. This signals a maturation point where engineering discipline around context and harness design becomes economically necessary.