Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its closely watched Mythos model, and it turns out the thing can do all kinds of stuff - including making you feel bad about your own productivity.
Ethan Mollick, a notable AI researcher and University of Pennsylvania scholar who has clearly been having more fun than you, published findings on his Substack Tuesday. Fable, he wrote, "outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin," adding that it was "capable across many problems and produced some startling results - it would work up to a dozen hours executing on multi-page specifications."
Perhaps most strikingly, Mollick used Fable to create a variety of video games - all generated via "one initial prompt" in Claude Code. Among these: Snake, which is exactly what it sounds like. You're a Pac-Man-like serpent roaming around eating apples, never stopping, and if you run off the screen you die. It's very 1980s arcade but, like many of those old games, it's weirdly addicting. I played it longer than I'd like to admit before remembering I am a gainfully employed writer and not, in fact, a serpent who likes fruit.
Then there was Strata, where you roam an endless network of subterranean tunnels lighting as many lanterns as possible. The graphics look like a degraded version of Myst - they aren't great - but the fact that the game exists at all from a single prompt is impressive. Mollick even managed to create Duino, a game based on Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. The animation is best here - a lone figure in a nocturnal landscape - though there isn't much gameplay other than walking around while Rilke passages materialize on screen.
Aside from instant games, Mollick also used Fable to create an isochronic map - a visualization showing travel time between any two locations - with accuracy and detail that is, frankly, arresting. The implications are pretty clear: software projects that once required entire teams - games, mapping tools, highly complex specifications - are now being spun up from a single prompt. It's reason for vibe coders of the world to rejoice. As for founders and operators watching AI capability curves, it's a useful data point about how quickly the floor is rising.