Window into the Future

First, the boring-but-important bit: Fable is included on most paid Claude plans through Tuesday, July 7. If you want the full story of what changed, The Neuron wrote a good plain-english version, but the short version is all you need: you can use the best model there is, on your normal plan, until Tuesday.

And the smart way to spend the next two days is setting up a few things that keep paying you back long after Tuesday. Five worth stealing:

1. Stop over-explaining it. 

Your instinct is to write a giant prompt with fifteen rules. Anthropic's own guide says that makes Fable worse. The elaborate prompt setups you built for older AI are the thing dragging it down. Tell it what you’re actually doing and who its for, hand over the mess, and get out of the way. Their exact template, which you can paste right now:

im working on [the bigger thing] for [who its for]. they need [what the output lets them do]. with that in mind: [your actual ask].

so instead of a numbered checklist, its: "im writing the Q3 board update for our exec team, they've got five minutes and care about pipeline and churn, here’s everything. Write it."

2. Give it the whole pile at once. 

The one thing Fable does that a normal model can’t is hold a huge amount at once without losing the thread. So stop feeding it one doc at a time. Drop in the whole folder, the call notes, the horrible spreadsheet, and ask for the finished piece, not a summary. This is the sit-down job you’ve been putting off for a month.

3. Give it a memory. 

Keep one plain running doc where it notes how you like things, what it got wrong last time, the calls youve already made, and have it read that every session. Anthropic recommends this outright, and you can set it up with no code in about ten minutes. It means you stop re-explaining yourself in every new chat, which, if you’re anything like me, is half the reason AI starts to feel like a chore.

4. Brainstorm with the cheap model, then have Fable build it.

This is the one people are calling the smartest move of the week. You’ve only got Fable at half your usual limit this week, so don’t burn it on the thinking. Open a chat with Opus 4.8 and have it interview you about your day (where you lose time, what you do over and over, what drives you mad) until you land on one small tool that'd actually help. Then, while Fable's still free, have Fable build the thing. Cheap model to figure out what you want, Fable for the part that lasts.

In Claude Opus 4.8: 

"Interview me about my work, one question at a time, about where I lose time, what I repeat every week, and what annoys me most, until we land on one small tool or system that would genuinely help. Then write a clear, detailed brief for building it." 

Then paste that brief into Fable 5: "Build this for me, end to end. Here's the brief: [paste]."

5. Build yourself a "does this pass?" check. 

My favorite, and the one I’m stealing. A creator fed Fable all their past posts, had it work out what made the best ones land, and turned that into a scorecard. You can copy his prompt to build you own:

Here are my three best [posts]: [PASTE THEM]

1. Study them and write a scoring rubric out of 100. Base the categories on what makes these good: [hook, structure, voice, clarity]
2. Draft a new one on [TOPIC]
3. Score the draft against the rubric as a strict reviewer
4. Under 95: rewrite and score again. Repeat until it passes
5. Show me only the final version and its score

swap "posts" for emails, designs, proposals, reports. I immediately wanted one for this newsletter.

Notice what all five have in common? none of them are really about Fable. They’re about building yourself a little system, a way of describing things, a memory, a reusable playbook, a quality bar, that keeps working after the model changes. And it will change. Fable might be behind a paywall by Wednesday. Thats the whole thing I keep banging on about with AI-proofing your work: the tool is temporary, the way you work is what compounds. (It’s most of why 100 School exists.)

(and yeah, there’s a loud fight this week about whether Fable came back weaker, its real, but its a coding argument, and for everything mentioned above, that shouldn’t be a concern)

So don’t rush, don’t feed it junk. Set up one of these five properly and let it earn its keep long after Tuesday. And build yourself something fun like the koi pond too, for morale.

How to AI: Fable 5 Edition 🤖

Every week, this section is your shortcut. Here are a couple of tips/ ways you could try Fable 5 this week that are worth your time:

• How to use Claude Fable 5 without going bankrupt

• How to prompt Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic’s full guide)

• How to use Claude Fable 5 (unlearn your ChatGPT habits)

• How to create cinematic websites with Claude Fable 5

Before you go ✌️

Whatever gets launched or pulled back next week, the habit matters more than the tool, so I’m curious where you actually are right now?

none of those? hit reply and tell me where you really stand. I read every one.

See you next week!