Fable is okay, just slower, eats tokens and not any better at coding tasks. Maybe a little better, but not better enough. It's a lot faster to have a cheap and fast flash agent / sonnet do the implementation work with Fable tagging cleanup and divergence from spec and goals.
Flash 3.8 is genuinely my favorite all around model right now. And yeah Opus 4.6 was the last Opus model I liked. 4.8 is tolerable. Opus 5 is a terrorist. It just can't follow an instruction to save its life and regresses rapidly. Sol at least stays on track so I have to smack it's hand way less often. I am biased, but Flash 3.8 and 3.7 are the first Gemini models I just recommend to others.
Amusingly, as an autonomous coding agent, I kind of like Opus 5. But I have to bound it on tasks or it just goes off the rails. But I'm bounded tasks, it is genuinely solid. It's kind of like the new Sonnet 5. Right now my favorite model to interact with on the frontier side is Sol 5.6 so I have been using that as my coordinator. Flash 3.8 is my other favorite just because it is so fast and I use it a lot at work and know its quirks.
