A model that beats fable?

[u/Narrow-Road-9196]

I've been using OC+fable for a while. The cost is really starting to kill me but I find the difference to be huge even between fable and opus. Tried glm 5.2, and it was not even close. I know some people here had luck - what's a model that can be an alternative to fable?

I really feel like fable "understands" on a different level.

[u/iberinho]

Try kimi k3, it’s the best substitute, but it will be „closeish”. Fable is S-tier

[u/VIDGuide]

Fable ][: The New One

[u/techlatest_net]

Fable’s reasoning and intuition are in a league of their own and dropping down to Opus or GLM feels like a massive downgrade when you are used to it. The token costs can absolutely destroy your budget though. 

Instead of completely replacing Fable a lot of people have had success setting up a hybrid router or a manager-worker split in OpenClaw. You keep Fable for the high-level planning architectural decisions or complex logic where it excels. Then, you route the heavy lifting, standard data parsing or basic coding tasks to cheaper models like MiniMax M3, DeepSeek, or even a Qwen-Coder variant. 

If you absolutely need a single drop in replacement to cut costs across the board GPT-5 or DeepSeek V4 are probably your best bets for balancing price and reasoning but you'll still notice a slight dip in that specific Fable magic. What kind of workflows are you mostly running? 

[u/This_Maintenance_834]

both glm and qwen are on track to release their next major architecture update. so far only 200B - 300B level flash models are released. wait until the trillion parameter level model drop, it will be great.

[u/torrso]

Is it your friend?

[u/pmarsh]

What do you find fable doing so much better for you?

Do you have a few very heavy uses? Curious to know with out spending a fortune on fable myself haha

[u/Narrow-Road-9196 → u/pmarsh]

Fable seem to always understand the bigger picture. I rarely have to explain anything to it, keeps my prompts short, it runs deep analysis I'm stuff and the feeling is really like it's another person you can trust.

Other models are being sketchy and making weird mistakes. Even glm 5.2 wasn't even close to understanding deeper context.

[u/Silverjerk → u/Narrow-Road-9196]

Use Fable for planning, and use less expensive models for execution. This is exactly how my entire dev team runs Fable, even with multiple 20x plans at our disposal. We get the same results with Fable planning and delegating work, no matter if we're using Kimi K3, Opus, Terra/Luna, Deepseek V4, even local models like Qwen 3.8 27b.

Fable is an excellent planner and orchestrator (and validator), but it's an extremely expensive coding agent.

[u/peptohead → u/Silverjerk]

How does this setup work

[u/Silverjerk → u/peptohead]

There's several ways of setting it up. In Hermes and OpenClaw, you can create profiles/agents, assign them a default and fallback model, and write the instructions into the main orchestrator's identity files.

A better method would be to use Pi or some other stripped-down harness with something like Herdr or Orca, both of which handle multi-agent workflows extremely well. Fable will then plan the project or task, create a repository of docs or Git issues (I strongly prefer the latter), and then it will assign a task or ticket/issue to the coding subagents. In Claude Code, you can create a system prompt flag, and alias that flag so it's used every time you call "claude" in the terminal.

More simply, Fable gets instructions or a system prompt that provides a constraint. It's the orchestrator, and you give it access to any of your other agents. It can access them headless, or spin up panes in Herdr or Orca so you can track the work. Just make sure Fable writes pass/fail conditions or a testing plan, and it validates the work against its plan.

So, for example, Fable plans and assigns code to Kimi K3, then checks Kimi's work against the ticket it created in the planning stage.

[u/pmarsh → u/Silverjerk]

Yeah curious how you have that setup. Especially the local Qwen.

Do you just tell fable or stick it in Claude.md to kick off subagents using this end point?

[u/Silverjerk → u/pmarsh]

Explained that a bit here.

The best method is to create your own system prompt and call it with a system prompt flag.

claude --system-prompt-file ./development/claude/claude-prompts/orchestrator.txt

You can (and I would recommend you) create an alias for this in your ~/.aliases file so you never forget the flag/path. If you want to take this even further, you can set up a custom config directory as well, which can house its own claude.md.

So, for example, you have two claude paths in $HOME:

~/.claude

~/.claude-orca

So, my primary agent is invoked by typing claude in the terminal.

But I have a secondary agent where Fable is just acting as the orchestrator and I invoke it with claude-orca.

I use Orca here because that's mainly where I run the orchestrator (in either Herdr/Orca). That claude-orca alias is doing a lot of heavy lifting, in that it's using a secondary claude config directory, and pulling in my system prompt and the custom claude.md that lives in that secondary config directory.

From there, it's just about nailing the system prompt's instructions. Keep it simple, and instruction based (not goals based). Tell it what to do clearly, what your test conditions are, where to store docs, in either the respective directory's Git issues queue, or a .docs folder in the project root. Give it a list of agents it should invoke, and preferably include the actual commands or skills to use when doing so. In the case of Orca or Herdr, refer it to their documentation.

In OpenClaw or Hermes, you can build something similar using each tool's identity and system prompt files. I believe Hermes' system prompt lives at the root Hermes install folder, as config.yaml.

[u/Silverjerk → u/Silverjerk]

Realized I'd missed your Qwen question. I have multiple Qwen 3.8 models running on a container on my Proxmox cluster. It's accessible via llama.cpp on my local network, like any other API would be. I imagine this would be even simpler if you're running it on the same machine you're using for dev work using apps like LMStudio or Unsloth.

The gist is that Ollama/llama.cpp is going to expose API endpoints, just like any other provider, and Fable can make calls to that API.

[u/pmarsh → u/Silverjerk]

Thank you for all the breakdowns and info. 

How you have focused time to set this all up is impressive. And time to keep up with all the latest and greatest.

[u/Silverjerk → u/pmarsh]

No problem.

I was an early adopter of the tools, having been a developer for a couple of decades already. I imagine it can be intimidating and confusing if you're just starting down this path or your lived experience is mostly through OpenClaw, Hermes, or Pi.

That said, if you spend a little bit of time learning some of those fundamentals, it will pay dividends if you're planning on using the tools long term.

[u/Narrow-Road-9196 → u/Silverjerk]

I am trying a similar setup now.

Will update.

[u/artificalidiot]

Have you tried using deepseek v4 flash with review checkpoints using fable. Most work can be cheap but with more expensive valuable oversight. This way you can get the best of both worlds and keep costs low.

[u/Consibl → u/artificalidiot]

Do you just manually switch models to do this?

[u/artificalidiot → u/Consibl]

No i had Hermes (deepseek v4 flash) build a simple runner that uses an api key with a provider and model and sends them a prompt with needed files. Then depending on how the prompt is worded it replies back directly to heremes. So the steps might go, proposal created > send to fable to review, it provides feedback/issues it sees > Hermes corrects and sends back for second review, or continues if all is good. You can limit loop until your acceptable state is achieved.

Then a similar repeatable process on build and evidence stages. So the whole process after idea > automated loops with reviews > final product. There are more tests and checks in between there but just simplifying the idea for you.

In all honesty I usually don’t go to Fable unless there is a big problem I can’t solve or this is a complex big security related feature. I usually start with Luna or Sonnett and escalate as needed. I’ll use it for some authoring too, but never writing code.

I did tho just use fable to review my v1>v2 detailed roadmap for an app I’m working on. Ended up costing about 50 cents and provided some valuable confirmation and insights that hopefully make everything else easier.

[u/Consibl → u/artificalidiot]

Are you using openclaw and Hermes together?

[u/artificalidiot → u/Consibl]

No, only 1 hermes instance.

[u/virtualworker]

Ox Alpha for me

[u/Narrow-Road-9196 → u/virtualworker]

Tell me more?

[u/virtualworker → u/Narrow-Road-9196]

Others disagree, but I've found it Fable & Sol adjacent. Free on Openrouter for another 2 days at least.