How to harness your dragon with Fable, tech leaders turn to model routing, and coping with AI rockstars

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:05)
So, Andrew, bots just continue to take over the internet, don't they? Seems like they're everywhere now.

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:11)
Can't really escape them. Seems like most websites can't escape them either.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:16)
Yeah, we didn't want to call this as an official story because it's kind of outside of our wheelhouse, but yeah, we've been reading this week just about how AI bots are just like taking over the internet now, and like humans may actually now be in the minority of interactions on the internet, which, you know, as a long time Reddit user, I've just gotten used to that by now.
I feel like it's been that way for quite some time, but yeah, it is interesting to just see how many bots are out there on the internet right now. And I think it's, you know, the one thing that we should bring up is it is important for every engineering leader that's listening to this to be aware of this trend, because security threats are really starting to change now. Years ago, we've always had this term, it's kind of a derogatory term of script kiddies, you know, and this was a term used to describe like low experience hackers who would like go download a script from some malicious website and then go use it to try to hack into companies with bad security practices. But now you can like have your AI generate the script for you if you can, you know, trick it or something.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:27)
If you can manage to trick it, the guardrails on these kinds of models are definitely getting better, which is, you know, much to my relief, but it still doesn't protect us from the fact that the reality is, you know, more than half of all internet traffic now is, you know, from a bot as opposed to a human. It's officially their space. Like you said, there's a lot of like downstream consequences of that that I think are going to be more profound. We've covered recently on the show about how most new websites now are AI generated as opposed to human created, which has its own unique facets about like archiving the web and how we train these models on the web, the living web itself. You kind of get this phenomenon where the exhaust pipe is feeding the production input, and the exhaust pipe is, we're kind of like, that's not necessarily the stuff you want to be breathing. And so it's not the best kind of content that's going to be enriched over time. You're going to lose that human diversity. So I think that's the biggest flag here is like, wow, if bots are now half of all traffic, we do need to change how websites are served and delivered. Sure. And a lot of those experiences are moving around. But then what does it mean for when we even look at like traffic data? Like, what is an audience anymore? Who is your audience?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:41)
Yeah.
Well, welcome to the Friday Deploy brought to you by LinearB, the engineering productivity platform that helps you wrangle agents in your SDLC. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Ziegler** (2:53)
And I'm your host, Andrew Ziegler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:56)
And this week we are covering why Andrew is absolutely obsessed with the fabulous Mr. Fable.
Is token maxing about to die and cleaning up after AI rock stars? We've got a really great line up of stories today. But let's just get right into the story that is catching everyone's attention, and that is the launch of Fable 5 from Anthropic. Andrew, what's going on here? And why are you so excited?

**Andrew Ziegler** (3:21)
Well, this is a first, at least in recent history, where Anthropic is dropping a model while we're not in here actively recording, so we don't get to share our immediate thoughts on what happened.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (3:32)
We actually get to cover it.

**Andrew Ziegler** (3:33)
I actually get to cover it. So I actually got a really great about 72 hours at this point of maxing out all of my usage sessions that have been available and playing around with the new Fable 5 has been really eye-opening, not only about the direction in which all of this is going with bigger and bigger steps every model release, but also about the opportunities. Because of all of the ground we've already covered as burgeoning AI engineers, we've carried a lot of like crufts and a lot of things into our current way of working. And when a big next level foundation model like this comes out, which is what Fable is, it represents an opportunity to turn and reflect inward on your practices. And so that's what I've been doing with Fable, is reviewing how I have been doing processes of the past with Opus, and with other things that I do with Sonnet as well. Really doing a thorough audit on my harness, and my skills, and my hooks, and what matters when I start a project. And the reason for this is twofold. One is, we're not going to have Fable forever, because it's only available to accounts and subscription accounts right now until the end of the month. And then it's going to become an API based consumption, and it's like $50 per million tokens because it's that smart. So you're talking about a really expensive model to use. So you have this limited window to turn it through all of the stuff you've been working on to get the improvements baked in. So that when the model is taken away and it's more expensive, you have to now be metered with your usage of it, you still have the benefits of it baked in at a time that it was subsidized. So that's something that I've really been keeping front of mind. If you have access to Fable and you haven't used it and turned inward on your own tooling, on your own practices yet, this is my call to action to you. That's like the most imperative thing that you can do with access to this tool, because that's how you're going to get the benefits that carry you into the future.