Claude Fable 5.2 review: fast, creative, and finally not annoying

Anthropic just released Fable 5.2, their new frontier model, and I spent two days actually building things with it before recording this. I made an animated marketing video from a single tweet, assembled a pile of unboxed furniture using only blurry floor photos, and extended our CXO brand sprites into a full bug-defense game complete with a trailer. In this episode I walk through what impressed me, what fell down, and how I’m thinking about routing tasks between Fable 5.2 and Opus 5.5 going forward. What you’ll learn: What Anthropic launched with Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2, and when to reach for Fable instead of Opus 5.5My pros and cons after a couple of days of hands-on testingHow Fable 5.2 turned a tweet and a brand book into an animated video that doesn’t look like slidesThe geometry test every other model failed: assembly instructions for flat-pack furniture with no manualHow it handled a real re-architecture of ChatPRD’s product intelligence pipelineWhy I still wouldn’t let it design a website on its ownThe 3D typewriter it built me, and how you can get access to the model— In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Confessions of a Claude hater (02:54) What Anthropic launched: Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 (03:16) When to use Fable 5.2 vs. Opus 5.5 (03:30) Black holes, coding claims, and benchmarks (04:40) Guardrails and anti-distillation safeguards (05:12) My high-level pros and cons (07:23) Video generation: turning a tweet into an animated film (09:47) Animating the invader bots (11:29) Flat-pack furniture with no instructions (13:09) The bug factory game and its trailer (15:16) Real engineering: re-architecting ChatPRD’s product intelligence pipeline (16:57) Where it falls down: web design (18:08) Claire’s typewriter (23:02) How I AI bench preview (23:34) How to get it: availability, fast mode, and Fable resets (24:13) Final take — Tools referenced: • Claude Fable 5.2: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-and-mythos-5-2 • Claude Opus 5.5: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5 • Claude Code: https://claude.com/claude-code • HyperFrames: https://hyperframes.heygen.com/ • typed.page: https://typed.page/ — Other references: • Guillermo Rauch’s 3D record player: https://vinyl-gl.vercel.app/ • The bug factory game: https://www.cxo.dev/games/bug-factory — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Claire Vo?

  If you've been paying attention to my recent episodes, my model reviews and how I talk about how I work, you know this, I am kind of a Claude hater. Surprisingly, this started when they released Fable. I remember Fable showing up and it was such a huge leap in intelligence and such a stark reminder that intelligence does not make you intelligible, which meant I hated working with Fable. Fable was so hard to work with, so annoying to talk to, so not easy to understand. Same with Opus 5, just not an enjoyable model to work with, even though it maybe got the job done. At the same time, those models had come out a couple of months ago, I felt like Codex

• 0:44Claire Vo?

  really outpaced Claude code in some nice to have experience pieces in terms of their desktop app. So Codex became my favorite place to work and code, not only because it was a nice place as a software engineer, but things like browser use and computer use were just light years ahead of Claude code. But I have a confession, I am back to coding with mostly Claude code and mostly Opus 5.5. And today I have to tell you, the love affair is real. I am going to be breathless AI bro today. I am, I apologize. I usually try to avoid this, but Fable 5.2 is here and I love her.

• 1:28Claire Vo?

  I love her. I love her. She has her flaws, but this is a fast, capable, not annoying, creative powerhouse of a model. It absolutely has its drawbacks, but guess what? The things that it is not good at, our buddy Opus 5.5 is good at. Once we all have access to this model, I'm going to be a true menace to society. I'm going to build so much stuff. I think this might be the model that unlocks consumer AI because there is just so much cool that you can do with it. I

• 2:10Claire Vo?

  love Fable 5.2 and today we're going to do a just in time mini episode telling you how I tested this model, what I think it's great at, where it needs a little bit of work and why I think I'm a Claude boy. Let's get to it.

• 2:33Claire Vo?

  So let's get through the basics and then I'll show you all the amazing things that I built with Fable 5.2. So yes, today Anthropic is releasing Fable 5.2 alongside Claude Mythos 5.2, which is the same underlying model, but just available for cybersecurity and life sciences purposes. They are Anthropic's frontier model and this baby is a banger. It is not a replacement for Opus 5.5. In fact, they say most daily coding and knowledge tasks are Opus 5.5 tasks, but when you need scope, complexity, and I would say creativity, Fable 5.2 is amazing. There are going to be so many headlines about Fable 5.2. My favorite is that in science, it solved two open problems in

• 3:18Claire Vo?

  the physics of black holes. This is the little tidbit I told my kids this morning at the kitchen table. I am really excited about the frontier in terms of life and hard sciences, but let's focus a little bit about coding. What they say is it's really good at stubborn bugs, performance optimization, architecture, and long running tasks. It can do huge migrations. It can build things like operating systems. And I will tell you, my experience is it's very fast. You're going to see a lot of amazing benchmarks. It's basically outpacing all the frontier models at each model's

• 3:59Claire Vo?

  highest effort level. Frontier code, frontier suite, automation bench, all of them. It is doing really well. I am going to run it against the full how I AI bench. We're going to see a preview of that today, but I want to do the full end to end against all the newest models. And today is just a mini app on my impressions of Fable 5.2. Now, like all their thinky thinky models, there's going to be some guardrails that you need to know about, but I will say in my testing, I didn't come up against any of them. It might have to do with what I was testing, but I will say again, this model was just not annoying to work with. Love it. Thank you, Anthropic team. So there are still cyber and bio guardrails on this model, of course, unless you're in the Mythos

• 4:42Claire Vo?

  program. And there's also a lot of anti-distillation safeguards in this model. We'll talk about what it is, what it costs a little bit later. Okay. So what are my high level takeaways of this model? Having hands-on experience with it for a couple of days. The pros are it's really fast. I in fact asked the Anthropic team, is this as fast as it's going to be at launch? Because it was super fast. I never really felt like I was unnecessarily waiting for the model. And that's both the speed of individual turns as well as its autonomy and its willingness to alert me when it needed something, but no more than that. So it's really fast. It's also really good at creative work and

• 5:23Claire Vo?

  at being creative with one exception, which I will talk about. It's great at video generation and detailed video generation. You're going to see a lot of fun videos in this episode because I am super excited about what I was able to build. 3D and gaming, I think it's a step up. I'm not going to do one of those like AI YouTube bro race car games, but I did make a game and I thought it was pretty fun. It is really great at coding. It has helped me with some architecture, re-architecture work, long-running engineering tasks, things that previous models, Opus 5.5, Astra, et cetera, have not been able to really get through and it's not annoying. What are the cons? Well, it's not

• 6:05Claire Vo?

  good at front end and web design. You will kind of see that in some of the evals and things that I show you. Like it's really good. It's really tasteful when you give it a good brand or style guide and it's good at following it, but left to its own devices, it has incredibly concerning taste. Like she just does not have good taste. And then I think this comes from a lack of image gen model really shows because when a model is really creative, you want it to be creative along a lot of aspects. And I found myself a lot of times invoking OpenAI's image gen 2.5 to create

• 6:44Claire Vo?

  images and then, you know, Fable wasn't very good at that in particular. So I, you know, high level, I am going to use this model all the time. I really love it, but I want to show a couple of things that it was really good at. And then again, later we'll do the full how I AI bench. So first, let's talk about video gen. I have been making so many videos out of customer meeting notes, tweets, all these sorts of things. And so I've been really using this combination of hyperframes and Opus 5.5 to do videos. And I will say it's incredible. Like it's changed my life. It's changed how I do product marketing, all these things, but I feel like they all still

• 7:27Claire Vo?

  kind of felt like slides. You know what I'm talking about? These videos that really just look like animated Google slides or PowerPoints. And what was really incredible about Fable was that it took my AI-generated animated videos to the next level. And so the example I want to show you is I had this tweet about software factories. So everybody's been talking about software factories. I had this tweet about software factories and I gave Fable that tweet plus our cxo.dev brand guidelines and said, make this tweet a video. Now, I will say I have to go

• 8:09Claire Vo?

  back and forth and I want to show one sub-loop that I did that was really impressive with Fable that made this amazing, but look at what it generated for me. There's a story I keep seeing inside engineering orgs. It starts with one sentence, "We need a software factory." And everyone falls in love with the idea. So one team gets a quarter to build it. Plan, code, discovery, validation, review, release. On a slide, it's

• 8:36Claire Vo?

  Beautiful. Then they turn it on. The repo isn't ready. The checks are slow. Nobody's been trained. And what they really built is a worse version of Claude Code. So I won't make you watch the whole thing, but you can just see there, this is a full animated little space invader bot, full video and it keeps going. There's like a bug factory. It's done all these amazing visualizations. It ends with this like billboard. It's not a hundred percent perfect, but it's way better than it was before. It is certainly not like an animated slide. And I was just so impressed. I did not give it any creative guidance other than our brand book. I did not

• 9:20Claire Vo?

  storyboard this. This is really Fable being independent and building this by itself. And one thing that it did that I was really impressed by is we had these little invader bots, these little guys, and we just have static images of them. We put them on our CXO website. Jamie Gannon, which did an episode with us, previously made them for us. And I wanted them to be animated. I didn't want them, they were like, kind of before when I was using Opus or these other models, they would kind of like wiggle their way across the screen, but I wanted them to be animated. And so, um, what was really impressive is Fable made these little sprites of the space invaders

• 10:05Claire Vo?

  and how they would move, when they would cheer, jump. Again, this was not prompted, but so impressive to me because these are really abstract objects. And I think it did a really quite nice and creative job of animating these. In fact, I have built this kind of invader animation into the new HowI AI eval bench. And so if you see here, animate the invader bots will now be an eval as part of the HowI AI bench. I'll test different models against it. But look, you can see he walks in, he looks like a little Claude Code Claude. Um, he asked if you can ship it, they get excited and jump up and down. Again, this is something that a hundred

• 10:48Claire Vo?

  percent, it looks super simple. I could not get any other model to pull off. And it was fast. It was fast. And so I just think about how it has a good sense of geometry, how it has a good sense of movement. And I've been really impressed with Fable 5.2 in terms of animation. I'll give sort of a side, another side example of its excellence in geometry, which it was a eval that no model, two days ago, three days ago, could fix, which was, I got a very shady pile of furniture, straight drop ship from China, delivered to my house,

• 11:29Claire Vo?

  and it showed up with an open bag of screws, 25 pieces of wood and no instructions. And I tried so hard last week to get this, to put together a set of instructions for me. Every single model failed. And I dropped it to Fable 5.2 and it did such a good job. It not only gave me this like, kind of diagram right here, but it gave me bit to bit how to put it together. If you've ever done complex IKEA or flat pack furniture, you know that the order in which you put stuff together is really important and it put really good. And I know, because I followed these instructions with the, um, the guy that came to my house to assemble it, it did it in

• 12:13Claire Vo?

  the right order. And this was something, again, that no other model was able to do. I tried, I tried. So I know this is a true benchmark and it did it truly from pretty low res images of the flat pack items on my floor with Chinese language labels on them. And again, zero instructions. Um, good news to you all. This piece of furniture is now in my house and feeling really nice. Okay. So that is like geometry and video, which I have been very happy with. One second. Is I extended that CXO factory game into a space invader shooter game. Um, again, this isn't like one of those 3D games that are going to be really impressive from

• 12:58Claire Vo?

  a visual perspective. But what did I love about this game? It is funny. So good job, Fable, on being funny. So I made this game about not running a bug. Um, you are engineers that have to stop bugs before they get to, um, production. You get to pick your challenges. And so if you have more agents, you have more agents stopping bugs, but then if they miss a bug, more bad stuff gets through production. You get protected time, therefore you have more time to catch bugs, or you have tests. Again, you can see the tokens are getting through. Ooh, I got some free, I get some free credits. I get these look good to me. Oh no, vibe coding,

• 13:43Claire Vo?

  so many bugs. Okay, so this is my CXO game. And what I really loved about this game was, again, I just said, make a game about fighting bugs, using our space invaders from our brand. And it came up with all these concepts. It tied it to business things that we thought were awesome. It made a trailer for us that I thought was really funny. I'm not going to play the sound because it's going to be really annoying for people watching, listening on the podcast. But it says basically this quarter, the team had one job, then they added more agents, they shipped faster, they call finance, but finance saw the token bill, so they get downgraded

• 14:21Claire Vo?

  to the cheap model and can only solve easy bugs. And it, um, stars the mono repo, which is this giant space invader as the final boss. I think it's really funny. I played it a couple of times and actually giggled. I'm going to try to get this live today. But again, like, remember how annoying Opus 5 and Fable were when they came out? So annoying, not a good hang, not enjoyable to be around. And now we have this like funny model that I like working with. So that's all the kind of fun stuff. We did a game. Let's just take a quick world tour through real AI

• 15:02Claire Vo?

  engineering, coding and architectural thinking. Again, I've been really, really pleased with this model. If you haven't been following my changes, I've been using a lot of Claude projects and Opus 5.5 to run a lot of my coding tasks right now. It's really helped me break through some coding challenges. I also think the front end work is quite nice. Um, and so I turned Fable 5.2 on my product intelligence product at Chat PRD, which is a complex ingest, organize, summarize, auto wiki product that I've been working on for like six months. Um, and it's like a pretty messy code base. And so I asked Fable 5.2 just to make the pipeline more efficient, easier to maintain, just do its greatest product thinking. And I will say, I'm like

• 15:47Claire Vo?

  very happy with the work here. It's quite sensibly organized and in fact, matches my upcoming, kind of like in my mind roadmap of things that I needed to do. The other thing that was really nice on working with Fable 5.2 on this is it stopped at the right moments, but was pretty autonomous until it needed a PR. And so I found that it's long running, that it's got good architectural thinking, that it does code nicely, and that it's not annoying to work with, um, on this fairly complex, kind of like data pipeline product that has, I will say, like very messy code in it from six months of iteration. So about halfway through this migration, and we'll get through it all and let you all know if it works, but so far,

• 16:32Claire Vo?

  so good. And I have been really happy with it. I'm going to do a quick run on things that I think are terrible. And then I'm going to show you the best thing that Fable 5.2 built. So please stick around till the end, um, because the eye popper item is at the end. But before we get there, I do want to talk about some things that it's bad at. It's bad at web design. It's like real bad at web design. And so I've been trying to make AI that, um, helps me slow down, websites that help me slow down. So I asked it to design a new, kind of like browser homepage for me. This is so, so ugly, such much slop, so, so terrible. And so when I've

• 17:17Claire Vo?

  left Fable 5.2 to its own devices, it's made pretty bad designs. Same with this storybook. I've been working on a kind of like ghostly storybook. Um, same with this storybook. Like, it's okay, but it's pretty ugly. So I might pair Opus 5.5 with Fable on the backend for some of the design stuff, but I really don't love the front end design of Fable. So that's a kind of like thumbs down on the model. But if you want to see the thing that I was most excited to build, let me show it to you right now. Okay. So Guillermo at Vercel, um, I saw

• 17:59Claire Vo?

  yesterday made this amazing, um, 3D record player that plays public domain images with crashes in the grooves. It's so beautiful. I'm obsessed with it. And, um, he actually gave the source code and I was mega, mega, mega inspired by this and pointed Fable 5.2 at a similar but different problem. And I would like to introduce you to Claire's typewriter. So this is a fully functioning 3D rendered typewriter. You can type on it by clicking the keys, or you can type on it by using your keyboard.

• 18:46Claire Vo?

  You can zoom in and get a close up of how it works. If you backspace and type over things, you can do that. Welcome to How I AI. This is my beautiful typewriter. Okay, so this is, you can see I have a literal typo in this. You can clean it up. It will go and put wide out. It doesn't quite get it right, but it will do wide out and type over. But that's not the only thing. You can make it real vibey. So let's turn on some music. Let's turn on some rain. We need some nice rain.

• 19:30Claire Vo?

  You can start a writing timer here by turning one of these sand glasses. That starts a 15 minute timer. The big one's 30 minutes. And then you also have these beautiful prompts. So if you want to write about waiting, don't say what it's for. You can get a writing prompt. You have this nice cup of coffee. I have actually integrated Guillermo's record player over here. You can change different radio stations. So we can have a jazzy radio station. That's nice. And this is like, I am totally going to write this way. But even better than all this, I've made a bunch of different scenes. So this is my soft evening scene.

• 20:15Claire Vo?

  I can turn on the light. It follows the time of day. So right now it is evening and soft evening. I can go on a train with my travel typewriter. I can sit by an oil lamp with my beautiful glass sand timer. Or I can write in handwritten pages. So I have this pencil. I can say hello, my beautiful How I AI guests. So nice to have you here. Not perfect, but we get there. And then my favorite one, I can do a Y2K computer.

• 20:57Claire Vo?

  And I can change it between a green and amber screen. And if you go back and I say, I love this thing. I can print the page and it will print it on my dock matrix printer. Keep it in a stack. I can open up these stacks, read them. I can save them. I can copy the text. And I am going to deploy this and you all can use it. I am obsessed with this thing. It is a single shot. I'm going to turn off the music for a minute. Actually, it's pretty relaxing. I'm going to keep it on. I like it.

• 21:40Claire Vo?

  It is so relaxing and I just think I'm going to come in here and do full screen writing on my beautiful typewriter. And listen, you can even hear the static when it plays on the record player. And this truly one shot by Fable, the keyboard. I've done some tweaks. I've kept giving it new features, but I'm going to deploy this and see if you all want to type on my beautiful, beautiful typewriter. This has been my AGI moment. I lost it when I saw this. I think it is so cool.

• 22:19Claire Vo?

  It's helped me be so creative and it's just something I could never imagine being able to do before. And I was able to do with Fable 5.2. So that, I'm back. I'm back, baby. I love her. She is great. I want to use it all the time. It makes me happy. Now, again, I have done the full How I AI bench here. You can see here it is very fast. So even something as complex as animating the invader bots only took 16 minutes. A lot of things are in sub one minute. There's some complex tasks.

• 23:00Claire Vo?

  So I will do the full How I AI benchmark against a couple other models. Maybe in a week or two, just so we can see all of this against each other. But I really love the model. Again, let's just close with how do you get it? So it's going to be available in the API and on the cloud platform, as well as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It's going to be in the cloud apps and in cloud code. I've been using it in cloud code. There's going to be a fast mode. So even though it's already fast, they're going to make a new fast version. And subscribers, you're going to get Fable resets. So use this thing. I just, it like sparks joy.

• 23:43Claire Vo?

  And I just think back to how much I truly hated, truly hated the original Fable. And now I just, I feel warm fuzzy feelings about this model. So good job, Anthropic. You hooked me back. I never thought it was possible, but you did a really good job. That has been How I AI hot takes on Fable 5.2, my new favorite little creative model. I'm going to get back to my typewriter. I'm going to get back to my creative projects. And you all are about to see a lot of video and a lot of consumer apps out of your friend Claire. Thanks for joining How I AI. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts.

• 24:26Claire Vo?

  You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at How I A I pod.com. See you next time.