Fable, Opus, Claude Code and Claude Web: How To Use Them All For The Best Results (And Fewest Tokens)

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Fable, Opus, Claude Code and Claude Web: How To Use Them All For The Best Results (And Fewest Tokens)<br>This week I walk through the launch a website and newsletter using all of the above models/harnesses and more to get a great result without Fable blowing through my subscription in an hour of work.

Alex Willen<br>Jul 09, 2026

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Fable’s back! But for a limited time only, of course. Though as I am writing this, Anthropic just announced that subscriptions can keep using Fable until July 12. Maybe they’ve just learned to set expectations low and deliver happy surprises, and in fact it’ll never go away at all. A man can hope.<br>In any case, this seems like an excellent time to address one of the biggest challenges of using LLMs: figuring out which combination of model, settings and harness is right for the task at hand. This is one of those topics that makes me realize how difficult it must be for normies to keep up with the latest goings-on in AI. You’ve got Haiku, Sonnet, Opus and Fable. Each of them can operate at a thinking level of low, medium, high, xhigh and max. There’s also ultracode, but ultracode is actually xhigh with more subagents and workflows. Then you’ve got the original Claude on the web, as well as Cowork and Code.<br>How on earth is anyone supposed to figure out which of those to use? I spend hours every day with Claude in all of its various forms, and I still couldn’t tell you whether Sonnet on max is better than Opus on low for any particular query. And then of course we’re at Opus 4.8 but recently went from Sonnet 4.6 to Sonnet 5, so that upends whatever intuition I’d managed to build up.

Anthropic has charts like the above, which are sort of helpful, though given the incredibly jagged nature of AI capabilities, they really aren’t that useful in telling you what you should use for the specific thing that you need to work on right now. The only way to actually know whether one model beats another is to run the same task past both of them, ideally multiple times, and judge the outputs. But of course if you want to get work done instead of evaluating models, that is a terrible use of time and you just kinda have to take your best guess.<br>Up to this point, my strategy has primarily been to just pay for the Max subscription and use Opus on max thinking all the time. Inefficient on both cost and time, but I’m not going to quibble over a couple of dozen dollars a month for the most powerful technology in the history of mankind! Plus I’ve usually got a few tasks running in parallel, so slower-than-necessary responses don’t bother me.<br>Unfortunately Fable really blew up that plan — that thing uses tokens like it is nine-year-old me playing that one Ninja Turtles arcade game at Chuck-E-Cheese.

I genuinely wonder how much money I spent on this over the course of my childhood.<br>I had a number of projects that I really wanted to throw at it during the brief window of subscription availability, but it rapidly became apparent that I was going to have to ration my usage.<br>Which Model, Harness and Thinking Level To Use

When I say that prior to Fable’s launch I was always using Opus on max, that’s not quite true. I’m really just talking about my conversations in Claude Code and web. That does not mean there aren’t valid uses for other models, though, particularly when you’re using AI within a product or recurring job.<br>Haiku : Useful for simple tasks where you need intelligence embedded in an application. I just signed up for a couple of services that send daily emails with requests from reporters looking for sources in order to get free PR for some of my products. I’ll be using Haiku to filter these down to the ones I care about and tag them with the relevant product.

Sonnet: If you’re concerned about token usage, Sonnet is pretty good at simple coding tasks and research questions. I typically use it like Haiku, within applications but where they need a little more intelligence than Haiku provides. In the reporter email filtering application, I’m using Sonnet to draft responses to queries (though I will definitely edit those prior to submission).

Opus: My daily driver for most things.

Fable: If you’ve got deeper pockets than I, just use Fable for everything. There is something about it that’s difficult to quantify, but it just feels deeply intelligent. If you want to keep your costs under control, though, use Fable for planning and review, not execution. More on that below.

From a harness perspective, I haven’t done enough with Cowork (or any of the many external harnesses like OpenClaw and Hermes) to comment, so I can really only tell you about Claude web and Claude Code.<br>The major difference between those two, at least in my experience, is that Code is best at execution — writing code, making API calls, managing files — but lacking in creativity and not much...