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.
I would rather wait in a queue than be routed to a degraded model. And if they _have_ to degrade the models, then I wish they would fucking tell us. Instead, it's "I have a strong feeling".
That we have to guess at this is by far the worst part of the AI era. It feels like a dark cloud over my productivity. It makes my body tense for the entire day when it happens. Not healthy.
They have repeatedly said they do not ever intentionally reduce model quality and do not degrade in this way, and that a model version number is always the same.
But, of course, OP is an empirical claim to the contrary, and I'd be curious to see if anyone (who's been capturing data over these timeframes) can replicate the same results and if Anthropic has any comment.
See March 26, 2026 incident. Model not degraded, but harness changed to strip out past thinking tokens when a session went out of cache to save money and ease capacity constraints (affected API users too), resulting in bad degradation.
Waterluvian · · focus · HN ↗
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.
zarmin · · focus · HN ↗
That we have to guess at this is by far the worst part of the AI era. It feels like a dark cloud over my productivity. It makes my body tense for the entire day when it happens. Not healthy.
meowface · · focus · HN ↗
But, of course, OP is an empirical claim to the contrary, and I'd be curious to see if anyone (who's been capturing data over these timeframes) can replicate the same results and if Anthropic has any comment.
cma · · focus · HN ↗