I was a Claude hater. Fable 5.2 changed my mind.

1. 0:00 – 2:54

   Confessions of a Claude hater

   1. CVClaire Vo0:00

      If you've been paying attention to my recent episodes, my model reviews, and how I talk about how I work, you know this. I am kind of a Claude hater. Surprisingly, this started when they released Fable. I remember Fable showing up, and it was such a huge leap in intelligence, and such a stark reminder that intelligence does not make you intelligible, which meant I hated working with Fable. Fable was so hard to work with, so annoying to talk to, so not easy to understand. Same with Opus 5, just not an enjoyable model to work with, even though it maybe got the job done. At the same time those models had come out a couple months ago, I felt like Codex really outpaced Claude Code in some nice-to-have experience pieces in terms of their desktop app. So Codex became my favorite place to work and code, not only because it was a nice place as a software engineer, but things like browser use and computer use were just light years ahead of Claude Code. But I have a confession. I am back to coding with mostly Claude Code, and mostly Opus 5.5. And today I have to tell you, the love affair is real. I am going to be Breathless AI Bro today. I am. I apologize. I usually try to avoid this. But Fable 5.2 is here, and I love her. I love her. I love her. She has her flaws, but this is a fast, capable, not annoying, creative powerhouse of a model. It absolutely has its drawbacks, but guess what? The things that it is not good at, our buddy Opus 5.5 is good at. Once we all have access to this model, I'm going to be a true menace to society. I'm gonna build so much stuff. I think this might be the model that unlocks consumer AI because there is just so much cool [beep] that you can do with it. I love Fable 5.2, and today we're gonna do a just-in-time mini episode telling you how I tested this model, what I think it's great at, where it needs a little bit of work, and why I think I'm a Claude boy. Let's get to it. [upbeat music] So let's get through the basics, and then I'll show you all the amazing things that I built with Fable 5.2. So yes, today Anthropic is releasing Fable 5.2 alongside Claude Mythos 5.2, which is the same underlying model, but just available for cybersecurity and life sciences purposes. They are Anthropic's frontier model, and this baby is

2. 2:54 – 3:16

   What Anthropic launched: Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2

   1. CVClaire Vo2:54

      a banger. It is not a replacement for Opus 5.5. In fact, they say most daily coding and knowledge tasks are Opus 5.5 tasks. But when you need scope, complexity, and I would say creativity, Fable 5.2 is amazing. There are gonna be so many headlines about Fable 5.2. My favorite is that in science

3. 3:16 – 3:30

   When to use Fable 5.2 vs. Opus 5.5

   1. CVClaire Vo3:16

      it solved two open problems in the physics of black holes. This is the little tidbit I told my kids this morning at the kitchen table. I am really excited about the frontier in terms of life

4. 3:30 – 4:40

   Black holes, coding claims, and benchmarks

   1. CVClaire Vo3:30

      and hard sciences, but let's focus a little bit about coding. What they say is it's really good at stubborn bugs, performance optimization, architecture, and long-running tasks. Um, it can do huge migrations. It can build things like operating systems. And I will tell you, my experience is it's very fast. You're gonna see a lot of amazing benchmarks. It's basically outpacing all the frontier models at each model's highest effort level, Frontier Code, Frontier Sweet, Automation Bench, all of them. It is doing really well. I am going to run it against the full How I AI bench. We're gonna see a preview of that today. But I wanna do the full end-to-end against all the newest models, and today is just a mini ep on my impressions of Fable 5.2. Now, like all their thinky, thinky models, there's gonna be some guardrails that you need to know about. But I will say in my testing I didn't come up against any of them. It might have to do with what I was testing, but I will say again, this model was just not annoying to work with. Love it. Thank you, Anthropic team. So there are still cyber and bio guardrails on this model,

5. 4:40 – 5:12

   Guardrails and anti-distillation safeguards

   1. CVClaire Vo4:40

      of course, unless you're in the Mythos program, and there's also a lot of anti-distillation safeguards in this model. We'll talk about what it is, what it costs a little bit later. Okay. So what are my high level takeaways of this model, having hands-on experience with it for a couple days? The pros are it's really fast. I in fact asked the Anthropic team, "Is this as fast as it's going to be at launch?" Because it was super fast. I never really felt like I was unnecessarily waiting for the model, and that's both the

6. 5:12 – 7:23

   My high-level pros and cons

   1. CVClaire Vo5:12

      speed of individual turns as well as its autonomy and its willingness to alert me when it needed something, but no more than that. So it's really fast. It's also really good at creative work and at being creative with one exception, which I will talk about. Um, it's great at video generation and detailed video generation. You're gonna see a lot of fun videos in this episode because I am super excited about what I was able to build. Um, 3D and gaming, I think it's a step up. I, I'm not gonna do one of those, like, AI YouTube bro race car games, but I did make a game, and I thought it was pretty fun. It is really great at coding. It has helped me with some architecture, re-architecture work, long-running engineering tasks, things that previous models, Opus 5.5, Astra, et cetera, have not been able to really get through, and it's not annoying. What are the cons? Well, it's not good at front end and web design. You will s- kind of see that... In, um, some of the evals and things that I show you, like, it's really good, it's really tasteful when you give it a good brand or style guide, and it's good at following it. But left to its own devices, it has incredibly concerning taste. Like, it, she just does not have good taste. And then I think this comes from a lack of image gen model really shows, because when a model is really creative, you want it to be creative along a lot of aspects, and I found myself a lot of times invoking OpenAI's Image Gen 2.5 to create images, and then, you know, Fable wasn't very good at that in particular. So I, you know, high level, I am gonna use this model all the time. I really love it. But I wanna show a couple things that it was really good at, and then again later we'll do the full How I AI bench. So first, let's talk about video gen. I have been making so many videos out of customer meeting notes, tweets, all these sorts of things, and so I've been really using this combination of HyperFrames and Opus 5.5 to do videos. And I will say it's incredible. Like, it's changed my life.

7. 7:23 – 9:47

   Video generation: turning a tweet into an animated film

   1. CVClaire Vo7:23

      It's changed how I do product marketing, all these things. But I feel like they all still kind of felt like slides. You know what I'm talking about, these videos that really just look like animated Google Slides or PowerPoints. And what was really incredible about Fable was that it took my AI-generated animated videos to the next level. And so the example I wanna show you is I had this tweet about software factories. So everybody's been talking about software factories. I had this tweet about software factories. And I gave Fable that tweet, plus our cxo.dev brand guidelines, and said, "Make this tweet a video." Now, I will say I have to go back and forth, and I wanna show sh- one sub-loop that I did that was really impressive with Fable that made this amazing. But look at what it generated for me. There's a story I keep seeing inside engineering orgs. It starts with one sentence: We need a software factory. And everyone falls in love with the idea, so one team gets a quarter to build it. Plan, code, discovery, validation, review, release. On a slide, it's beautiful. Then they turn it on. The repo isn't ready. The checks are slow. Nobody's been trained. And what they've really built is a worse version of Claude Code. So I won't make you watch the whole thing, but you can just see there, this is a full animated little space invader bot full video. And it keeps going. There's, like, a bug factory. It's done all these amazing visualizations. It ends with this, like, billboard. It's not 100% perfect, but it's way better than it was before. It is certainly not, like, an animated slide. And I was just so impressed. I did not give it any creative guidel- guidance other than our brand book. I did not storyboard this. This is really Fable being independent and building this by itself. And one thing that it did that I was really impressed by is we had these little invader bots, um, these little guys, and we just have static images of them. We put them on our CXO website. Jamie Gannon, which, did an episode with us previously, made them for us. And I wanted them to be animated. I didn't want them... They were, like, kind of before,

8. 9:47 – 11:29

   Animating the invader bots

   1. CVClaire Vo9:47

      when I was using Opus or these other models, they would kinda, like, wiggle their way across the screen. But I wanted them to be animated. And so, um, what was really impressive [laughs] is, uh, Fable made these little sprites of the space invaders and how they would move, when they would cheer, jump. Again, this was not prompted, but so impressive to me, because these are really abstract objects, and I think it did a really quite nice and creative job of animating these. In fact, I have built this kind of invader, um, animation into the new How I AI Eval bench. And so if you see here, animate the invader bots will now be in Eval as part of the How I AI bench. I'll test different models against it. But look, you can see he walks in. He looks like a little Claude Code Claude. Um, he asked if you can ship it. They get excited and jump up and down. Again, this is something that 100%, it looks super simple. I could not get any other model to pull off. And it was fast. It was fast. And so I just think about how it has a good sense of geometry, how it has a good sense of movement, and I've been really impressed with Fable 5.2 in terms of animation. I'll give sort of a side, another side example of its excellence in geometry, which it was a eval that no model two days ago, three days ago, could fix, which was I got a very shady pile of furniture, straight drop-shipped from China,

9. 11:29 – 13:09

   Flat-pack furniture with no instructions

   1. CVClaire Vo11:29

      delivered to my house, and it showed up with an open bag of screws, 25 pieces of wood, and no instructions. And I tried so hard last week to get this to put together a set of instructions for me. Every single model failed. And I dropped it to Fable [laughs] 5.2, and it did such a good job. It not only gave me this, like, kinda diagram right here, but it gave me bit to bit how to put it together. If you've ever done complex IKEA or flat-pack furniture, you know that the order in which you put stuff together is really important, and it put really good... And I know, 'cause I followed these instructions with the, um, [smacks lips] the guy that came to my house to assemble it. It did it in the right order. And this was something, again, that no other model- Was able to do. I tried. I tried, so I know this is a true benchmark, and it did it truly from pretty low-res images of the flat pack items on my floor with Chinese language labels on them, and again, zero instructions. Um, good news to you all, this piece of furniture is now in my house and feeling really nice. Okay, so that is, like, geometry and video, which I have been very happy with. One second. Is I extended that CXO factory game into a Space Invader shooter game. Um, again, this isn't, like, one of those 3D games that are gonna be really impressive from a visual perspective, but what did I love about this game? It is funny. So good job, Fable, on being funny. So I made this game about not running a bug

10. 13:09 – 15:16

    The bug factory game and its trailer

    1. CVClaire Vo13:09

       factory. [lasers firing] Um, you are an engineer that has to stop bugs before they get to, um, production. You get to pick your challenges, and so if you have more agents, you have more agents stopping bugs, but then if they miss a bug, more bad stuff gets through production. You get protected time, therefore you have more time to catch bugs. Or you have tests. Again, you can see the tokens are getting through. Oh, I got some free f- I get some free credits. I get these look good to me. Oh no, vibe coding. So many bugs. Okay, so [laughs] this is my CXO, um, game, and what I really loved about this game was, again, I just said, "Make a game about fighting bugs using our space invaders from our brand," and it came up with all these concepts. It tied it to business things that we thought were awesome. It made a trailer for us that I thought was really funny. I'm not gonna play the sound because it's gonna be really annoying for people watch- listening on the podcast. But it says basically this quarter the team had one job, then they added more agents. They shipped faster. They called finance, but finance saw the token bill, so they get downgraded to the cheap model and can only solve easy bugs. And it, um, stars the monorepo, which is this giant space invader, as the final boss. I think it's really funny. I played it a couple times and actually giggled. I'm gonna try to get this live today. But again, like, remember how annoying Opus 5 and Fable were when they came out. So annoying, not a good hang, not enjoyable to be around. And now we have this, like, funny model that I like working with. So that's all the kind of fun stuff. We did a game. Let's just take a quick world tour through real AI engineering, coding, and architectural thinking. Again, I've been really, really pleased with this model. If you haven't been following my changes, I've been using a lot of Claude Projects and Opus 5.5 to run a lot of my coding tasks right now.

11. 15:16 – 16:57

    Real engineering: re-architecting ChatPRD’s product intelligence pipeline

    1. CVClaire Vo15:16

       It's really helped me break through some coding challenges. I also think the front-end work is quite nice. Um, and so I turned Fable 5.2 on my product intelligence product at ChatPRD, which is a complex ingest, organized, summarize, auto wiki product that I've been working on for, like, six months. Um, and it's, like, a pretty messy code base. And so I asked Fable 5.2 just to make the pipeline more efficient, easier to maintain, just do its greatest product thinking. And I will say I'm, like, very happy with the work here. It's quite sensibly organized, and in fact, matches my upcoming kind of, like, in my mind roadmap of things that I needed to do. The other thing that was really nice on working with Fable 5.2 on this is it stopped at the right moments, but was pretty autonomous until it needed a PR. And so I found that it's long-running, that it's got good architectural thinking, that it does code nicely, and that it's not annoying to work with, um, on this fairly complex kind of, like, data pipeline product that has, I will say, like, very messy code in it from six months of iteration. So I'm about halfway through this migration, and we'll get through it all and let you and all know if it works, but so far so good, and I have been really happy with it. I'm gonna do a quick run on things that I think are terrible, and then I'm gonna show you the best thing that Fable 5.2 built. So please stick around till the end, um, because the eye-popper item is at the end. But before we get there, I do wanna talk about some things that it's bad at. It's bad at web design.

12. 16:57 – 18:08

    Where it falls down: web design

    1. CVClaire Vo16:57

       It's, like, real bad at web design. And so I've been trying to make AI that, um, helps me slow down, websites that help me slow down. So I asked it to design a new kind of, like, browser homepage for me. This is so, so ugly. Such, much slop. So, so terrible. And so when I've left Fable 5.2 to its own devices, it's made pretty bad designs. Same with this storybook. I've been working on a kinda, like, ghostly storybook. Um, same with this storybook. Like, it's okay, but it's pretty ugly. So I might pair Opus 5.5 with Fable on the back end for some of the design stuff, but I really don't love the front-end design of Fable. So that's a kind of, like, thumbs down on the model. But if you wanna see the thing that I was most excited to build, let me show it to you right now. Okay, so Guillermo at Vercel, um, I saw yesterday made this amazing, um, 3D record player that plays public domain images with

13. 18:08 – 23:02

    Claire’s typewriter

    1. CVClaire Vo18:08

       the scratches and the grooves. [record player scratches] It's so beautiful. I'm obsessed with it. And, um, he actually gave the source code, and I was mega, mega, mega inspired by this and pointed Fable 5.2 at a similar but different problem. And I would like to introduce you to Claire’s typewriter. So this is a fully functioning 3D rendered typewriter. You can type on it by clicking the keys, or you can type on it by using your keyboard. [typewriter clicking] You can zoom in and get a close-up of how it works. If you backspace and type over things, you can do that. Welcome to How I AI. This is my beautiful typewriter. Okay, so this is... You can see I have a t- a literal typo in this. You can clean it up. It will go and put, uh, white out. It doesn't quite get it right, but it will do white out and type over. But that's not the only thing. You can make it real vibey, so let's turn on some music. [gentle music] Let's turn on some rain. We need some nice rain. Um, you can start a writing timer here by turning one of these sandglasses. That starts a 15-minute timer. The big one's 30 minutes. Um, and then you also have these beautiful prompts, so if you want to write about waiting, don't say what it's for, you can get a writing prompt. You have this nice cup of coffee. I have actually integrated Guillermo's record player over here. You can change different radio stations, so we can have a jazzy radio station. Isn't this nice? Um, and [laughs] this is like, I am totally gonna write this way. Um, but even better than all this, m- I've made a bunch of different scenes. So this is my soft evening scene. I can turn on the light. It follows the time of day, so right now it is, um, evening and soft evening. I can go on a train with my travel typewriter. I can sit by an oil lamp with my beautiful glass sand timer, or I can write in handwritten pages. So I have this pencil. I can say, "Hello, my beautiful How I AI guests. So nice to have you here." Not perfect, but we get there. And then my favorite one, I can do a Y2K computer, and I can change it between a green and amber screen. And if you go back and I say, "I love this thing," I can print the page [printer humming] and it will print it on my dot matrix printer, keep it in a stack. I can open up these stacks, read them. I can save them. I can copy the text. Um, and I am gonna deploy this, and you all can use it. I am obsessed with this thing. It is a single shot. I'm gonna turn off the music for a minute. Actually, it's pretty relaxing. I'm gonna keep it on. I like it. Um, it is so relaxing, and I just think I'm gonna come in here and do full-screen writing on my beautiful typewriter. And listen, you can even hear the static when it plays on the record player. And this truly one shot by Fable, the keyboard. I've done some tweaks. I've kept giving it new features. Um, but I'm gonna deploy this and see if you all wanna type on my beautiful, beautiful typewriter. This has been my AGI moment. I lost it when I saw this. I think it is so cool. It's helped me be so creative, and it's just something I could never imagine being able to do before, and I was able to do with Fable 5.2. So that... I'm back. I'm back, baby. I love her. She is great. I want to use it all the time. It makes me happy. Now, again, I have done the ha- full How I AI bench here. You can see here it is very fast, so, um, even something as complex as animating the invader bots only took 16 minutes. A lot of things are in sub one minute. Um, there's some complex tasks. So I will do

14. 23:02 – 23:34

    How I AI bench preview

    1. CVClaire Vo23:02

       the full How I AI benchmark against a couple other models, um, maybe in a week or two, just so we can see all of this against each other. But I really love the model. Um, again, let's just close with how do you get it. So it's gonna be available in the API and on the Claude platform, as well as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It's gonna be in the Claude Apps and in Claude Code. I've been using it in Claude Code. There's gonna be a fast mode, so even though it's already

15. 23:34 – 24:13

    How to get it: availability, fast mode, and Fable resets

    1. CVClaire Vo23:34

       fast, they're gonna make a new fast version. And subscribers, you're gonna get Fable resets, so use this thing. I just... It, like, sparks joy, and I just think back to how much I truly hated, truly hated the original Fable, and now I just... I, I feel warm, fuzzy feelings about this model. So good job, Anthropic. You hooked me back. I never thought it was possible, but you did a really good job. That has been How I AI, hot takes on Fable 5.2, my new favorite little creative model. I'm gonna get back to my typewriter. I'm gonna get back to my creative projects, and you all are about to see a lot of video and

16. 24:13 – 24:44

    Final take

    1. CVClaire Vo24:13

       a lot of consumer apps out of your friend Claire. Thanks for joining How I AI. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiai pod.com. See you next time

Episode duration: 24:46