fable5-mode

English | 简体中文

Make Opus 4.8 — or any Claude model — work like Claude Fable 5. A Claude Code skill plus guard hooks that give a non-frontier model Fable-5-grade work discipline: plan-gate, self-verification, and sub-agent routing, enforced mechanically.

The skill is invoked as fable-mode; its premise:

output quality = model capability × work discipline

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Quickstart

# 1. Install the skill (honors CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR; falls back to ~/.claude)
git clone https://github.com/cozytab/fable5-mode \
  "${CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR:-$HOME/.claude}/skills/fable-mode"

# 2. (optional) register the enforcement hooks — merges into your settings.json,
#    resolves its own path, idempotent:
bash "${CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR:-$HOME/.claude}/skills/fable-mode/install.sh"

# 3. In Claude Code, just ask for it — in any language:
   "use fable mode"   ·   "用 fable 模式"   ·   "do this rigorously, one-shot"

# 4. For a project you're taking seriously, turn on enforcement:
mkdir .fable
printf -- '- [ ] 1. first card (with a machine-checkable acceptance test)\n' > .fable/LEDGER.md

The skill works on its own; step 2 is optional (it turns the discipline into hard blocks). Claude replies in your language even though the skill is authored in English.

Design intent & what it changes

Why it exists. Weaker models mostly don't fail by being dumb in the moment; they fail by process: thinking while typing and changing their mind halfway, declaring "looks right" without running anything, fanning work out with no verification, and quietly stopping mid-task. Those are process failures, and process is fixable with structure. Since the "discipline half" of frontier output is model-independent, you can hand a cheaper model the working habits of a stronger one and recover a real chunk of the gap — paying in orchestration steps instead of a bigger model.

What you actually get.

• Thinking happens in the cheapest phase (a written plan gate), not mid-implementation.
• "Done" means an acceptance command passed — not "looks right."
• Critical output survives an adversarial refute pass before it ships.
• Context stays clean across long runs, via external SPEC/PROGRESS memory instead of a bloated transcript.
• The two rules models shirk most — write a plan before fanning out and don't stop with unfinished work — are enforced by hooks, not hope.
• It's honest about its ceiling: on a real capability wall (a long from-scratch derivation, holding a huge codebase at once, fine aesthetic judgment) it tells you to switch to a stronger model instead of faking it.

What it does not do. It won't turn Opus into Fable 5. It closes the discipline gap, not the capability gap. The cost is real — more orchestration steps and slower wall-clock on small tasks — which is exactly why you don't use it on small tasks. (Net token cost depends on the task; on rework-prone work the discipline can even come out lower.)

The six levers