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Fable 5 – Median thinking declined in August

428 points · 293 comments · espeed

  1. Waterluvian · · focus · HN ↗
    I have no hard data but I have a strong feeling this morning that something's wrong with Fable 5 compared to Friday evening.

    Just an hour ago I had Fable correctly identify an unused method that could be deleted. I then immediately get a diff for an exact duplicate method, and then Fable outputting, "I accidentally duplicated <method> instead of deleting it. Removing both copies now."

    The remaining morning complaints that makes it feel like something's off is that it will do a lot of "thinking" for simple things that previously took very little time. And it got very lost and completely mixed up DE-91M predicate names and implementations. Just absolute disaster code that I had over the past months come to generally expect it to do without issue.

    Glad I carefully review everything. I think what I need is reliability and consistency. But it feels like picking a model from the list doesn't guarantee that: that the models' "brain" is open on the table and they're screwing with it.

    1. prodigycorp · · focus · HN ↗
      New release of fable and opus 5.5 is pending and Anthropic is reallocating resources. Degradation always happens in transition, it sucks.

      Opus 5.5 is being served under opus 5 right now.

      1. SequoiaHope · · focus · HN ↗
        Can you elaborate on the mechanism of this degradation? If resources are not available I would expect a request to fail with a message about resources not available. Do they tweak back end model capabilities to maintain service in a degraded state?
        1. arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
          Dollars to donuts, they are speculating, and not privy to inside information on the topic.

          However, I believe that runtime model quantization is possible with some publicly-available inference engines (e.g. vLLM), so its not beyond belief that the closed labs do quantize at runtime, either to allocate compute, or to nudge users towards a preferred model (e.g. make the incumbent model dumber to push people to use the latest-and-greatest model, or vice versa to ease the load on the latest model, which is typically larger than the old one).

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