Fable 5: First Impressions

Everyone says this, and I promised myself I wouldn't, but I have to say it.

Mind. Blown.

I wanted to throw something visual at Fable 5, and I thought, oh, maybe a cool thing with a HUD display, like Iron Man. So I went to Pinterest and started pulling images. Movie dashboards. Glitchy cyberpunk decks. That old Mac screensaver of the DEFCON globe. WarGames. I dumped four images and a rambling voice memo into the terminal and asked: what does this inspire in you?

It pitched me a war room. A DEFCON map launching missile arcs, a spinning wireframe globe, a satellite, a row of surveillance mug shots that open dossiers when you click them. It asked me two questions — color direction, dense or sparse — and went.

The first thing I noticed — and this is true of a lot of my work lately — is that I just ramble. I change my mind mid-sentence. I go back and forth. Claude tracks all of it, no problem.

The other thing that impressed me: it took its time planning, and while it planned, I was still on Pinterest. Oh, add this. And this. One stylistic change here. I kept pumping stuff into the terminal mid-plan, essentially trying to break it. It never skipped a beat. It just kept revising the plan.

The first round wasn't perfect, but it was impressive. From there I went component to component and rambled some more. I like this, I don't like this, change that. One by one, every component got to the fidelity I needed.

So here's my advice: if you're going to use Fable 5, throw something at it that's a challenge. Have ambition. The less specific you are about implementation and the more verbose you are about intent, the better things go. It's good at art direction. It understands what you're getting at.

Anyway, check it out here. I am impressed.

One concern, obviously: we're all subsidized right now. This feels a little like the first taste of a drug. People are going to pony up the $200. It's slower, but it's effective, and I wonder if that gap just grows and grows — the people who put down money for the serious intelligence, and everyone else. I'm not saying anything everyone else isn't saying.

Things have definitely shifted.