Fable 5 came back on the 1st of July with a meter attached. Max plans get it at 50% of weekly limits from the 20th. Pro moved to usage credits with a one-off hundred dollars to soften the landing. The best model any of us had used was available again, and you had to decide whether a task was worth spending it on. Opus 5 landed on Friday at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output. Fable 5 is $10 and $50.
I have written a lot of code. Hundreds of thousands of lines across dozens of projects over twenty years. Some of it was clever. Some of it was elegant. Some of it solved hard problems in interesting ways. The best code I ever wrote was none of that. The best code I ever wrote was the code I deleted. A function that turned out to be unnecessary. A feature that nobody used. An abstraction that added complexity without adding value. A clever solution to a problem we did not actually have. Each deletion made the codebase better in a way that no addition could match.
Somewhere in the last year, we collectively decided that typing prompts into an AI and hoping for the best counts as software development. Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, and what started as a cheeky observation has become an actual workflow for people shipping production code. This is a problem. Let me be clear about something: I use AI coding tools every day. Claude, Copilot, Cursor. They’re genuinely useful. But there’s a massive difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding, and the industry seems determined to blur that line until someone’s startup implodes in a spectacular security breach.