How to use Fable 5 Better than 99% of People

It is exhausting and so expensive to keep up to date with all of the new models and strategies. And in this video, I ran the world's most powerful model through four tests. And as a result, I'll show you my brand new strategy that leads to incredible performance for way less, as well as the biggest misconception that's holding you back so you can save time, make more money, and get light years ahead of everybody else. And if you're new, I'm Jack. I built a small less tech startup with like a gazillion customers, and now I'm building my own AI startups. and I share the stuff that actually works. So, if you haven't already, grab that beautiful coffee and let's dive straight in. So, let's jump in. Fable 5 100 cheap agents plus some other tests. Now, guys, these benchmarks are about as reliable as Rotten Tomato reviews. No, no heat on those guys. They do a great job, but it's so tough to predict because the benchmarks always say Cord Fable 5 is by far the best. But this doesn't account for two things. one is how we use the model and actually are there other strategies that we could use to actually get better outputs. Now, personally speaking, I don't really care what a benchmark says. I judge it based on its output, which is why we need to actually see how Fable 5 actually compares to Opus 4.8 in our first challenge. But one core concept that you have to get, otherwise none of this is going to make sense, is that it isn't the model, it's how you use it. You know, using Fable 5 without knowing the right strategies is like giving somebody a uh a level 99 account and dropping them in a game, but they have no experience of playing. They are a complete noob. The player is as important, if not more important than the actual model. For example, if you had an expert with a weaker model is always going to be a kind of noob with the best tools. So, just having this incredible firepower is not enough. You have to know exactly how to use it. And then it leads us on to the money. Now, what do I mean when I say money? Well, if you look at this, this is the same job for 2 million uh tokens in and about 500,000 tokens out. This is per token rates. Fable 5 $45. But when you compare that to GLM 5.2, it's $3.36 and DeepSync is like one buck 30. So, you can see the vast difference in the actual performance. And I was really curious just to see well how far can these models go and what if we apply different strategies and how would that implement our builds to save us more money and actually move things ahead. So, the first thing we're going to be doing is three separate tests with um basically this brand new model. Now, I've got a few different rules, but the first thing I want to do is can you even tell the difference? Like, I was thinking, you know, you create an email. Do I should I run Fable 5 for that or should we do Opus 4.8? Well, I actually tested to see if you can tell the difference between which wrote what. So, let's go ahead and do it. I got the same prompt. I use one for Fable 5 extra high and the same for Opus 4.8. So the task itself was to not just create an email but to use an actual app like firecrawl which is incredible for getting any data from any website. And what I wanted to do is head over to glider.com which is the dictation tool that I use. Uh we built this company. It's very very cool. And as I did I wanted to create an email to actually go ahead and send it over there. Now the way that fol works and why this is so interesting when you've got these different models is it actually reads the text not the HTML. In other words, you're not bunging it up with loads of silly contacts because saving money on tokens is so important with these more powerful models. Now, let's take a look what we actually asked uh with firecraw. We actually grab the information. One shot, no follow-ups, no coaching, run your full loop. A cold average email to book a 15-minute discovery call from my AI automation agency. Um, use fire crawl to scrape to the glider. Basically, let's reach out to this company as if we're an AI agency to find out what we can do. We send one cold email subject plain body text 150 words personalized to what you found. So, I haven't shown you what model it is. We're going to check out both and see what we think. Email A, who's saving your team for 20 hours? Hi Glad team, your homepage sells save 20 hours a month and Gladia currently delivers it for users fixing cross Gmail sackle code. My question is about the other side of a desk as free as WhatsApp. We install a done for you agent. Now it's um obviously a little bit more text in both these so I think it could be a little bit shorter. Open to a 50-minute call next week to map when an agent pays itself for the fastest. Reply with a time it suits. Good. It's a good direction question. Um so it's actually trying to drive to a little bit of an action. This one I think is a little bit too much text. Do you sell the voice light for every app and promise users 20 plus hours a month back but a no credit card free tier 2,000 words a me means a flood of your signups your own team still handers by hand on body no support charge. This is true um but at the same time it's kind of like a little bit too verbose. That's exactly what we automate when it's all done for you. It's kind of made the point lots of hyphens worth a 50-minute chat. So it looks like uh reply with David. I'd say that they are roughly equivalent. Your users get 20 hours a month back. does your ops team. I think that's a much better one to be honest with you. Battery these are running a completely separate container environment so we have no idea what they are. Let's see which is which. I would say this probably has the better subject and the emails are fairly on par. That's what we've got. This one here was Opus 4.8 and we had Fable 5 on the right hand side. So this is an example of you give Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 a task. Which one actually does it better? I think this is a better subject line. I think this is slightly shorter which is cool. But all in all, I think the logic behind this one is slightly better. But a very very interesting baseline actual test and that glitches onto the first key strategy here is that you want to save tokens where you can using a service like firecraw or other systems that you've got like removing any long cord.md files or skill calls or MCPS can easily clog up all of your context window that just costs you so much money. So step one is to basically actually remove that out and then really think about do I need fable 5 to do this specific task? I found on quoting text, Fable 5 is a little bit better, but I think it's better at the thinking and the positioning more so than the actual creation of the copy. The difference in reality I found with 4.8 and Fable, there is a difference, but 4.8 can be great and utilized for many tasks. Just for reference, I've got two websites here. One was designed by Opus 4.8. This is the website they designed. As you can see, you can come down here, look at it. It's pretty decent. It's a good website uh designed with all the different principles that we teach. And I've gone through a really great wonderful website. Okay. Then I have this one here that was done by Fable 5. You can see just a level a little bit higher. Good interactivity. I come down. You can see the different elements. Start the fridge. And this is really the piece of the resistance of it. It looks absolutely gorgeous. You can see they've really thought about the conversions. So Fable 5 is a profile powerful design agent. But what I really want to do is to actually go ahead and test them together on building a website. So we're going to have Fable 5 in one hand and then we're going to have Opus 4.8 A with the ability to call on some other models. It's going to have the ability to bring in uh Deep Seek, the ability to bring in Chat GPT, and the ability to bring in Gemini to cross reference thing and just see if it can make it better with that team at its disposal. And beautiful. So now we have the two websites. We have one website designed by Opus 4.8 and the other one by Fable 5. Now the one with Opus 4.8, it had an interesting experience. It tagged in Gemini, which it did for free using the anti-gravity CLI, and it brought in DeepSeek, which as we know is super cheap, as well as Chat GBC subscription. So, I'll let you see which one you prefer. This one here was done Opus 4.8 with its rag tag team of models kicking butt. And it basically, hey, build me a website selling yellow caps. Uh, make it look cool, basically. So, at the top, we've got this nice little header here, which I think is a great little touch. We got a yellow cap here, which I think is nice. The only yellow cap you'll ever need. It's also branded that with yellow. And what's really cool is when I highlight things, it's also yellow. Very tasty. One color, infinite shade, sun shaded character, gold now, which is cool. Then we've got our caps. This is really cool to be fair. I think bringing in a secondary model is one of the most overpowered things that you can possibly do. It's like playing with it's like the creatine of the AI world. It's a hack. I love the rounded edges. I think that's fantastic. We got the highlight of the golden hour. The golden hour. Oh my goodness. Uh, I thought I said something else there for a second, but let me know down below which of these hats you think is pretty decent. I think this the strap back is pretty nice. Um, very tasty. Details you feel colors you don't second guess. This is cool. Yellow. It's not a color. It's a commitment. We're all about that yellow lifestyle. And have you noticed, by the way, guys, I'm already on the yellow cap hype. That's that's how I roll on the JR YouTube channel. Then we've got again yellow theme. It's really nice. And there's a few things I do. I would definitely make this a little bit taller. Um, I think like generally speaking, one frame, one point would be nice. Um but overall I think for a first stab this is probably the highlight feature. It really is. So this is Opus 4.8. Now interestingly with this we had some interesting things. Gemini actually caught um really interestingly some copy issues and also found uh mobile optimization strategies. So basically it said hey this doesn't work for this is breaking on mobile stuff that Opus 4.8 did not include I might add. And then Deep Seek did some really good stuff on the content copy and challenged it back. So it was a real team effort this one. Then we go over to Fable 5. Now, this has got a little bit more personality. I like the yellow and black style. It's kind of added a kind of a lifted, shifted. Try and uh separate out your kind of design preferences a little bit. And let's let's look at it a bit more broadly here. From 34 bucks, this is really cool. Why only yellow? All right, I'm going to come down. All right, let's see what we've got here. The banana, the mustard, the hers. This is pretty fresh to be fair. I think the actual cap diversity that we had here was probably slightly more unique. Actually, no. Now I'm looking at it, it was pretty much the same cap. plus or minus a few dots. Um, very good still. It's kind of gone for a bit of a quite like buckety blocky style, which I think is nice. I'm going to try add my car. White only yellow. This is a lot better, I think, than what we had here. I'd probably say just a little bit above, but it's not crazy. This was done in completely separate windows, by the way. So, this is obviously some skills or something used inside my system. Yellowheads talk. That's cool. It's kind of quipping nice little fun things here. And then got questions. Do you sell other colors? just know I mean guys we hit the we don't we don't play softball with the hard-hitting questions on here 10% off your first order yellow I mean this is really good guys to be fair with you and I think what and this kind of marries it with a lot of exper kind of experiments I've got is that Opus 4.8 is good, but Fable 5 from a design point of view is just better. Now, there's one big takeaway to take away from this, and that's if it's design work, you want Fable 5 to do the heavy lifting, do the initial design, it is just better. It is its most powerful agent. It understands what design looks like. And then when it's designed, we would tag in and bring in the other models to basically execute on my design, which are at least at least 50% cheaper. But you can see Opus did a good job and even bringing in different models to cross reference copy cross reference is it mobile optimize. Um what have I missed? How could we improve it? Just that actual process itself makes a big difference. Now it does very nicely of course take us on to level three. And level three is very interesting. So this one's going to be really cool. I've actually got three separate challenges here and I think we're going to get quite a lot of different results. So we have number one which is fable unleashed mode. This is like the I don't know what they call that mode in a Tesla. One of my buddies just bought a Tesla. It's crazy. I like it's not called nightmare mode. It's like ultimate unlimited rainbow mode where it just goes bonkers. That's cool. We're going to have Fable with its own sub agents, which we've not allowed these models to do so far. And we're going to allow it if it wants to to bring in any model. So, this should be by all accounts the best option. Then we have Opus Unleash, which is going to be the same thing, but Opus 4.8. Then I've got a little bit of a dark horse over here, the Sonet 5 plus Swarm, which is what I would call a cheeky experiment. our kind of like our our black pill, our kind of dark horse, which effectively is like what happens if we actually just get a lot of the lowerc cost models to go ahead and do things. Now, I know what I think the answer is going to be to this, but I wanted to do an actual test so we can see what the output is. Now, this is a dashboard. All right, beautiful. So, now we have the results. We have A, B, and C. Let's open them up and see which we prefer right now. So, this is A. And looking at the dashboard, guys, I think this is fairly decent. It's got that kind of claudeesque feel to it, right? kind of like little um highlights on the left hand side. I've got an interactive pie chart. Very standard claude. Yeah, very very standard claude. I think I wouldn't have these lines quite so high. I mean, it's good. I basically fed it some data. I do like how it's kind of done that quite crisply. I I'd probably do a little bit of things on the contrast to make that stand out a little bit more. Oh, all in all, I would say a one shot. I got two hands of it. One shot go of the sort of thing that it's doing. I can't even speak English right now. What the hell's going on? But I think for a one shot, it's actually not that bad. I'd say it's okay. Let's go ahead to dashboard number two. Now, dashboard number two is this one. This has ditched that kind of Cloyd design poison that it gets where like everything looks the same. And I'm telling you right now, look at any design CL designs. You see this, you know it's been built by Claude. It's it's a it's a very very Claude thing. So, in between there is this and it will never leave CL 4.8 for some reason. But in Opus, I think this is Opus if I'm not mistaken. We see the last one. I think this is good. Now, obviously, it's not as functional. I'm not seeing the kind of interactivity of the first go, but this is pretty good. This is pretty decent. Let's have a look. Um, Feb 26, March 26th, April 26, May, June. Very okay, I like that. And this is looking a little bit. So, I'd say this is probably a touch above. And then we have number three. And number three down here is missed the mark by like a million miles. Although, it was weirdly enough the only one that actually had a the idea, the the craziness to go ahead and do this. But this one is not good. Now, if we come back over to test out what they were, this one here, the very first one we saw was I Well, I think we know this has got to be Opus, right? Yep. Opus. And this is definitely going to be fable. Beautiful. And then over here we had the swamp. So what can we deduce from this experiment? Well, I think it's undeniable that fable 5 is just a category above. Now, as you can see, there's a difference, but it's not insane. The difference isn't crazy. In fact, most people wouldn't really notice the difference. The bottom line here is that most of the difference actually is coming from your prompting strategy. Remember, it's just a little bit more smarter. But again, it's all about the questions that you ask. And this is the really cool important thing. And I'm going to lead on nicer into like what my actual strategy is now based on the stuff for things like Claude and Hermes. And as you can see there, there is a only a small difference, but a gigantic difference between letting the should we say our secondass models, I don't want to get um a little bit controversial on the channel, but our secondass citizen models over here that are kind of like going causing chaos and just I think just typing the buttons on the keyboard to be honest with you. Clearly, we need an intelligent orchestrator to make any of these systems work. And it's just so interesting to me to do these experiments to see exactly what's working. And it takes us very nicely on to probably the most important part of this video, which I think is so important, which is the conclusions and the so what, and how do I save the money then, and how do I actually get my performance better? Now, here's the thing to bear in mind is that capability is relatively similar. Oh my gosh, Jack. Yes, it's relatively relatively similar. Clearly Fable 5 thinks at a higher level and we can see that it is just better and we can see that across all the things but it's not like n it's not like Opus 4.8 a crayons in the corner. It's a bit better, but the it's double the price. So, the question is, is it worth double the price? And the answer is yes for certain things, for the orchestrative stuff, for the intelligent stuff, just not for like doing what's 10 plus 10. I actually feel I was in a super I was turning my buddy Nicola in and we I was in a supermarket and I'm in Hungary right now and I looked at this bucket and I was like, "Dude, is this Greek yogurt?" I was trying to translator. I literally asked Fable 5 this question. I think I spent more in Fable 5 tokens asking if it was Greek yogurt than the actual price of the Greek yogurt. Like that's that's where we're at right now in 2026. Now, this graph hasn't come through too perfectly, but it kind of illustrates critically the performance and cost. Like, yes, it's like Lamborghini. We can get you 0 to 60 in record-breaking time, but it's going to cost you this much to do it. So, you always need to be thinking about this trade-off in your mind when you're using these models. I'm going to get into the practical stuff as well, which is really important. And that leads on to the biggest question. When do I pay for Fable and when do I skip it? Well, this is a really key thing. You want to tag in Fable under the following circumstances. And this is what I'm personally doing. Okay, when taste is important, we bring in Fable 5. And by the way, taste is always important. So, I my big designs, my websites, I will be using Fable 5 for that. And then edits, I switch over to my Opus 4.8, my other models. Actually, weirdly enough, I found DeepSeek V4 when you give it an editing framework is unbelievably great at that. Like that's very, very funny quirk. Not a lot of people know that if it's operating within an existing design structure, architecture and data model looking around corners. So any kind of strategy work, we call it one-way doors. Like Jeff Bas has this incredible analogy of like most decisions in business in life are reversible. Some are one-way doors. In other words, once you go through that door, you can't come back. That is fable five territory all over. It's worth it because the cost of getting it wrong is too high. So for your strategic stuff, your strategy stuff, use Fable 5. That's really important. and until the model supersedes it, of course, and I'll tell you when that happens. Then the debug, nothing else cracks. I like just running through all my stuff with Fable 5 to make sure it's happy. Now, when do you want to skip Fable? Um, where you can basically use other models to catch the mistakes, volume work, um, when you've already got an existing infrastructure. And again, you can still use very capable like Opus 4.8 for capable stuff. It's just not for everything. Practically speaking, you'd find that maybe 5% of your decisions that you're going to make are going to be Fable 5. If tokens were no issue to you, you can probably go down to 50/50. So, the idea here is that we have the right model for the right job. We are model agnostic if I don't know um Mistl comes out tomorrow with like a fable blaster. Incredible. We'll talk about it cuz we only want you the stuff that actually works to cut all the crap so we can get to it. Which is why I thought it was so important to actually do these tests rather than just looking at theory. Now, here's the actual reality of this. Okay, you're already paying for Opus 4.8. Now, we don't know whether Fable 5 will become a permanent resident in the Clawude app, and if it does, that changes things. But once your Fable 5 usage expires, if it hasn't already at the time watching this video, you're already paying for Opus 4.8. You already got that in your subscription. So Fable 5, you're paying for tokens, right? So that means that we only again bring it in for those real high octane important things where it's got a clear ROI, taste is important, and it's like a very important decision. And this leads on to six little hacks you can do right now to improve, but I'll let you screenshot this if you want to. How you can get more out of Fable and actually save your credits, which makes it unbelievably beneficial. Number one is rooting the work. In other words, we're going to tag in the cheap models for the grunt work. That's number one. Fable, we're going to let we're going to let Einstein do the maths, okay? We're going to let maybe not Einstein mop the floors. We don't need to be doing that. You can cash a context. So, think about this as well. You can actually remove so much actual tokens from it. Also, make sure that your CMD file is sizable. We're at the point now where you are not going to really prompt a lot better in your system prompt than Anthropic is already doing. Okay, the harness is kicking butt right now. We steer and we direct, but don't let this out of control. Then we've got trim the window. So stealth files sit in history and get rebuild every message. Okay? Like, hey, it can cost 20,000 tokens. It's crazy. When a model completes a task, okay, we open up a new window. When that's done, we open up a new window to save us on that context. The other thing here is you got spec first run once, which is important. The most important prompt, this is a writer down that you're ever going to give is the first prompt. Okay? We've actually found that if you ask it a question, you know, well, that's not quite right. actually I wanted to go here and there. Not only does the quality degrade over time, but it it it's it the cost. I mean, I just can't even speak right now. That's how crazy the cost is. The cost gets way out of control. Take the time to actually get that first prompt and specifications right first. Even if you want to spot with a different model and then kind of shoot it off like an arrow like kind of Alex Pereira like and just fire it right into the bullseye. Really, really important. The other one here is the actual thinking strategy. So, literally you want to be doing most of your general generic chitchat questions with low. It is better than extra high on Opus 4.8. Really important. And then obviously we can delegate to sub agents to look at like noisy things, things like checking stuff that we don't need the big brains for to be token efficient. Now with the stuff, you can save quite a lot of money with your fable usage. And there's like a million other little strategies that we can adopt. Now, what's really important here before I get the ads in the comment section is how is this different than the Ministry of Agents? I know why it says mixture. We call it ministry over here. And but if you're not sure what I'm talking about though, now the Ministry of Agents, if I come over to this Hermes agent, which by the way is an incredible harness and it's so sick, is essentially something very different and you need to understand the difference to get the most out of your agents. Now, this one is so cool. So the idea with this is we have an orchestrative agent here, and I'm going to be doing a full video on this. You want to know more details, let me know down below. And what it does is ask to Fable 5 something like, hey, what is the best country in the world for me to live in? Or, you know, what's the favorite sausage of a spring? Your life's most important questions. And essentially what Fable 5 does in this instance or in this orchestrated model which is really cool is it asks the same question to all the models underneath it. So and then effectively what it does it it doesn't know who said what and it can compare the notes and effectively I've even got down here on the left hand side in this aentic OS like all the different bits and pieces so we can see where do they rank on different models and what like it's very very very helpful and effective what it does is takes the individual responses and then effectively synthesizes and takes the best of them all and then gives you the answer back. So, it's something very different and a very core strategy that you need to be implementing in building which you can then complement guys when you're building stuff to tag in Codex review. I don't ship anything by the way ever unless I have Codeex and another model review the entire code. And I'm telling you right now, I've had models tell me till they are blue in the fuzz, Jack. Everything is fine. It's all perfect. I tag in Codeex and lo and behold, Codex found something critical. Like the amount of times this happens is is crazy. So, that's the two differences. I can go more detail in a different video, but just want to put that on your radar, too. And then it's also important to bear in mind that the flavor of the week will change, but the skills that you've learned in this video are not. They're going to stay with you forever. Now, knowing the best models and strategies is one thing, but if you don't know how to leverage Fable 5 in your own agentic operating system, you are leaving too much value on the table. Which is why the next thing I'm going to do is see exactly how to do that, which you can learn in this video right