This is great news. I love fable find it genuinely impressive for solving a lot of the problems I have to work with, but....

I don't know if this was a dark pattern that I don't understand, or true incompetence, but this, it's available in your plan, it'll stop being available in your plan, one date, then the next date, then pushed back to the next date, and now permanent, is the worst signaling I could possibly imagine rolling out a new product with.

There's a FOMO or an urgency component to it to get people in there and working with it. And I felt that to a certain degree, but not really, because I'm trying to build a business around this damn thing.

I was just talking to myself about that the other day, as I do, as a crazy person, and reflecting on the fact that I can't build systems, because I have no idea if models are going to exist from then one day to the next. I'm building out of skills and prompts and tooling around the work that Fable can do, and I realize, oh gosh, that's all going to disappear, or become twice as expensive.

I irresponsibly have a max 20 plan. Maybe not irresponsibly. Run a lot of stuff through the system. Don't use the full context, but I expected that I would blow through max 5 all the time. So I'm probably in sort of a sweet spot for them, where they're getting more money from me than a 5x, but I'm not using it at 20x. And 100% my plan was, well, when Fable goes to API only, I'm going to have to do the analysis, drop 20x for sure, and switch to API tokens and start rationing everything. Because I can't possibly spend that much on max 20 and then also pay them a bunch of API costs as well.

The sum total of which almost certainly would be losing money on me. Well, they're losing money on me anyway, but losing more money. Getting less money for me.

At a time where it feels like Anthropic wants to be winding its way into every single spot in my organization, which it kind of is, it's in spite of their own behavior and signaling. I should be, from their perspective, becoming more and more and more reliant on their tech explicitly while they have a lead, it feels like, to me at least. But this Lucy pulling the football over and over and over again has had me investing gallons of time in trying to make my entire infrastructure model agnostic. Which it absolutely isn't, to be clear. But it definitely has it on my radar. I'm definitely investing time I otherwise wouldn't. I'm definitely better postured than I otherwise would be. And if they were more sure-handed about how they rolled this stuff out... well, it would be like eating more vegetables and getting to the gym more. I would know that I needed to do it, but I wouldn't be investing any time on it. I would just be getting further and further into bed with them.

I don't know what they're thinking over there, and I'm aware that I could be probably reading articles that would tell me what they're thinking over there or what the heck is going on, but I don't have time for none of that. As a heavy user, ignorant of their internal policies for the most part, and the decision-making, God, it seems like a clown car of idiots.

Or, when I'm feeling a little less self-confident, I'm assuming that I'm getting played and I don't know how. Neither is a very good feeling.

I heard somewhere in a separate productivity self-help binge session that the key to being effective is constraints.

I don't know why I fixate on hex grids. I mean, I fixate on hex grids because of Fallout. But there's a million other aspects of Fallout that I haven't locked onto and had in my brain like a mind virus for my entire life.

Or are there? Maybe there is.

In any case, I think I have to build around hex, which means foisting a bunch of hacks on top of it to produce the kind of environments that I want to be able to produce. It really makes no sense. But when you start designing a game 35 years ago, I mean at some point you have to exercise and exorcise it.

Open Half-Hex Mask full-screen

God. Speed running rapid prototypes is a thing of beauty

I don't know. I used to feel this way about garbage collection. Maybe it's a new normal, but it does feel like cheating. Even for rapid prototyping? Do I really feel that way?

Maybe not for rapid prototyping.

Open Hex Instances full-screen

How old was that coffee?

It definitely wasn't new coffee.

More poking about. Claude Design is fantastic for mockups.

Deep insight. Deep deep insights. It's revelations like that why I should have a Substack.

Open Hex Radial full-screen

Oh man, I forgot this guy existed. The fountain still flows.

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