Claude Fable 5 is the model I reach for in Claude Code when a task is ambiguous, long-running, or full of tradeoffs — planning across steps, untangling a messy goal, weighing a design choice, keeping a long session pointed in the right direction. It's genuinely good at the hard parts.
Which is exactly why I stopped letting it do the easy ones. At $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output — double Opus 4.8's $5 / $25 — spending it on boilerplate and lint fixes is like paying a principal engineer to reformat your imports. The work still needs doing. It just doesn't need that person doing it.
A Claude Code task is rarely one task. Take a one-liner like:
Add rate limiting to our API.
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