Short answer: Sam Nadler hears it writes better and costs less; Jordan Metzner has not seen a difference on small coding tasks. David Petrou says 5.1 fixes Fable 5's loquacious language, but Gemini 3.8 Flash and Chinese models offer more tokens per dollar.
Watch this answer from Episode 51 (starts at 21:10) · Episode 51 notes and transcript
From Episode 51: It Ships While You Sleep. The AI Agent OS a Former Google Engineer Built After Leaving Google., starting at 21:10.
Sam Nadler [21:10]: Alright. One more, guys. I think this released yesterday, Fable 5.1. I haven't used it yet. I've heard it's better at writing than Fable five. Obviously, I think the top line is it's cheaper. But, yeah, any experience thus far? I'll start with you, Jordan.
Jordan Metzner [21:30]: I just been playing with it for a little bit, but there's so many models that came out today. There's the updated Google stuff, and I think there were some new stuff from OpenAI on Astra. But, yeah, I updated and I'm not sure I can tell you I can see a difference specifically just, like, from, like, The small coding task I gave it so far. But, yeah, I think everybody's pushing the frontier pretty hard. Elon said there's a new Grok model coming out any day now. So it seems like the competition is heating up and from a developer perspective, that that feels good. Give us kind of more optionality and choice. And then also been playing with some of the open source models. How about yourself, David?
David Petrou [22:03]: Yeah. I think there's a few things here. I'll just start from the developer experience. First of Anthropic is a fantastic company. I have a number of friends there. OpenAI has been a lot friendlier in certain ways. So, Anthropic, does not let you use, the subscription option with a different harness. So you have to go through Claude Code. You can't use Pi or anything else. OpenAI has just been much more welcoming, I would say. I believe Anthropic has fixed some of the problems that, were in a Fable five regarding the type of language it would use, and it would be quite loquacious and sometimes use terms that are quite oblique. And so 5.1 is an improvement on that. Still, though, when you look at cost and trying to be, Pareto optimal on cost versus quality, things like Gemini 3.8 Flash, which just came out today, it looks really good. But I also think that moving further, it's just look at DeepSeek. Look at, when look at what's what's happening with these Chinese models, and we're starting to see the market really be really moving or, spending their money in places where it might not be the absolute frontier, but you can get much more tokens per second, much more tokens per dollar.
