Log 001 /
Fables and Reality
Anthropic’s Fable model was released to the public today and I am once again dazed by the state change. I was already abusing Opus 4.8, sending oneshotted codebase-wide changes to production without a second glance. Fable feels more trustworthy, more reasonable, more thorough. So much so that I’ve broken my nightly routine to write this page, a memorandum to days of thinking.
I don’t think as deeply or intensely as I used to. On one hand it feels like skipping the gym. You settle into the weakness and lethargy convinced that one day you’ll create the workout plan and climb out of the rut. Only, in this case, the part of you that atrophies is the part that’s required to break out of the stasis. Your mind is your most dangerous weapon until it’s not. Problem solving, thread unwinding, organizing, troubleshooting, sentence forming - all of it amplifies your brain’s capabilities agnostically. Piecing together a puzzle at work directly translates to advanced puzzling at home. And for the last 6 months I’ve stopped puzzling. I used to bang my cerebellum against code challenges late into the night and knead ideas with strong mental hands to pass the time. My hands are weak now and I know it is from the lack of use. I don’t wrestle with abstraction anymore or hold on to a thought as it barrels from concept to concept. I let my agent do that and now I feel like I need an agent to do the type of work I used to love.
On the other hand, my bosses have never set eyes on the code that runs their business. They deal with people and deals and timelines and the way our branding makes us look bigger than we are. These are not sophisticated tasks and yet they have more power and money than I do. Does a Fable-level model allow me (and every other “technical” employee) to escape the terminal? Or is there really room for more software engineered machinations in the abstraction tree? Do I try to build a company or do I build another loop?
My mind is me. Therefore it is unacceptable to let myself waste away in the absence of a technical challenge. Nonetheless, a challenge that has already been mastered produces a paltry dose of motivation and it appears that software development has been more or less mastered. Where do I send my thoughts, then?
Philosophy has always struck me as interesting. Chemistry as well. Whatever I choose, I need to spend an uniterrupted bunch of hours toiling in the fields of erudition. If I don’t, I won’t recognize myself soon, not because I’ve changed but because I won’t have the capability.
The software cambrian explosion is unfurling around us. The demanding niche of software development is now tablestakes for anyone doing anything competitive. Software is dead as a route to wealth…or it will be soon.