Hey friends,
Fable 5 is back in a Claude near you.
It vanished for 19 days (a genuinely wild export control story), returned Tuesday, and leaves our subscriptions Monday, July 7.
Watching it work last few days, something clicked for me.
What makes Fable feel different isn’t just intelligence.
It’s behaviour. It finishes LONG running tasks.
It checks its own work. It doesn’t end with “let me know if you want me to continue.”
Behaviour can be written down. So I wrote it down.
It’s a free skill called Big Model Smell, and it teaches ANY model to work like Fable.
And I’m sharing it with you below.
BTW keep reading until the end, I'm sharing a FREE week of Cowork.
📌 The 30-Second Catch-Up
- Fable 5 returned July 1 after a 19-day shutdown
- It’s in Pro, Max, and Team plans until July 7
- After that: usage credits only
- “Big model smell” is what people call how Fable feels.
✨ What’s Actually In The Skill
I spent the last few days studying how Fable operates and turned it into rules your everyday model can follow:
- Owns the outcome, not your list of instructions
- Never says “done” without running the thing first
- Never ends on a promise. If it wrote “next, I’ll…”, it goes and does it
- Reports failures plainly instead of “this should work now”
- Leads with the answer, reasoning after
It won’t raise your model’s IQ. It fixes follow-through. Which, if you’re like me, is what you were actually missing.
👉 Get Big Model Smell here (free, no signup games)
BTW, get a free week of Cowork if you're not already on a paid plan here. Limited to the first 3 people only.
🛠 Use It This Weekend AND Beyond (3 Steps)
- Grab the file and drop it into your skills folder in Claude Code or Cowork. On ChatGPT or Gemini, paste it at the start of the chat.
- Pick one real task you’d normally babysit.
- Run it twice before Monday: once on actual Fable 5 (it’s still in your plan), once on your normal model with the skill loaded.
Feel how much of the gap closes.
Pro tip: give it a task with multiple steps. That’s where the difference stops being subtle.
📈 Why This Matters
The Fable blackout taught me something uncomfortable:
These top models are rentals. Access comes and goes.
But behaviour you’ve written down is yours forever.
That’s the whole reason I keep banging on about skills.
🫡 Final Thoughts
Grab the skill, run the test, and reply telling me which model you loaded it on and what changed.
I wanna hear what you’re building with Fable 5!
I’ll share the best results next week.
If a friend of yours keeps complaining that AI sucks, tell them to try Fable 5.
They’ll thank you 😉
To keeping what the good models teach you,
Nahid
