The ability to understand and maintain inherited projects is more valuable than the ability to create new greenfield projects.

Thats very true, calling coding craftmansship or considering oneself an amazing coder but only for new projects is obviously wrong.

A great coder loves legacy old projects because theyre challenging, unpredictable, undocumented, and if you figure out, you are like a God.

Starting the perfect greenfield project and writing amazing code the first week is a skill every freshmen student at a CS college has. That's not a problem area, its a solved thing.

But do it for 10 years straight after 5 acquisitions, different infrastructure, different industry, language, culture? You are a RARE BREED.

Or even simpler put, never measure yourself with easy things, only with the hard ones since then the easy things are a joke.

> But do it for 10 years straight after 5 acquisitions, different infrastructure, different industry, language, culture? You are a RARE BREED.

Been there done that, the problem is you will not get rewarded by your superiors. Keeping old shit alive is useful to keep your skills sharp, but it's bad in a culture utterly dominated by "resume driven development".

In terms of value as an income, then for a consultant this is most likely true - for staff working in a megacorp not so much.

And often, it's not the code that is the issue. You understand the code perfectly fine and can edit it easily. The main issue is always finding out the "why" so you do not remove any Chesterton's fence while coding for a new change request.

Is Fable 5 just Opus 5 with some additional long-context management modifications for extended self-directed work? Or are they actually truly different models?

I suspect they make a big model first. In this case it's Fable. Then they run the shrinker steps to make Sonnet and Opus. Sonnet is smaller, takes less time to make, so it got released first. Opus needed few more weeks to cook.

With this iteration they had a delay because when the Mythos was ready they had some sort of "Oh shit" moment and spent half a year adding safety guards to it. Then slowly rolled it out, but got another delay due to a government block. So, maybe the work on making Opus and Sonnet only started after they got a green light from the administration.

Presumably, now that they learned how to do this safety-wrapping the next iteration of Mythos / Fable / Opus / Sonnet is going to show up faster.

Something like that.

But I wonder how they were able to release Sonnet 5 during the period when even people inside Anthropic were legally barred from using Mythos/Fable?

There is word on the street that they allowed employees to work with a slightly stronger internal version of Mythos (5.1, if you will) that, in their parsing of the order, wasn’t restricted. If true, in practical terms, they ignored the order.

Iirc the ban only applied to non-Americans. While anthropic found collecting citizenship information on all customers too burdensome, it's a much smaller lift to collect such info for your own employees.

So I'm assuming at least a subset of employees could continue using the models during that time.

Although the ban was only for non-Americans, Anthropic said that they'd also restricted access to their own employees internally, because they had no other realistic way to apply the government's orders. I guess it's possible they were lying, but seems unlikely.

No, they're different models. Knowledge cutoff has been updated.

based on pricing I think it's safe to say they're different. why would they charge half price when fable has been very popular?

They just got a huge amount of customer price info over the past few days after they went token only for Fable. I suspect the conversion rate was extremely low, with consumers far less sticky than they might have hoped. In my case I was planning on swapping, probably to a Chinese model, when my sub expired this month, but the release of Opus 5 is probably enough to keep me paying rent until the next open model/closed model face-off in a couple of months.

Some of us happen to be in positions to make those decisions at our respective companies. What we think does, in fact, matter.