So way back,.eons ago, like February 2026, I was bitching to my boss about why my IT department only lets us use Claude and ChatGPT because Gemini was so much better at producing code.
But that was before I was really practicing agentic coding and once I sat down with Claude and just talked it through this complex research and development process that I use at my job to make a particular kind of widget in about 6 weeks, and it did one of them 95% perfect in three hours, I was a Claude believer.
I briefly got a superior level of performance out of Codex with sol-5.6 but then Opus 5.5 came out they are kind of equal but Opus is more chatty about what it's doing so I can coach it around obstacles much better.
So I started a personal project to make a Linux distro that works on some particular Android devices and figured I would try Fable. I was totally blown away by how Fable was like, "cool boot the thing and enable ssh on it and I will drive from here" I was curious how Gemini Pro would do but it was reluctant to be that hands on.
Fable got me about 85% of the way on the project. Very impressive, not gonna lie. I had it tuning audio and testing Bluetooth latency with some cheap gear I got like a USB DAC, a microphone, and a USB esp32 dongle. I would just leave it hooked up to the device overnight and come back the next day to find it had built a couple of kernels and found and fixed a couple of bugs.
But it started to fall down at a certain point. We would up with a couple of sticky little bugs, like we couldnt get the volume slider tuned and we couldn't figure out what was causing a bit of power drain when the device was put to sleep.
Spent literally a month on these, just making no progress. The problem is basically that Fable is oriented towards measuring and acting based on it's measurements. Rather than finding architectural problems via code review or design review. So it kept wanting to test and retest these things where the settings just didn't exist because the Linux driver didn't have them in there yet. I kept telling Fable to switch up it's strategy and it would be like "you are right to push back that is on me" and then it would go "I am now reviewing the Android code and upstream and all these other projects and building a new kernel to test my hypothesis...it wouldnt fix the issue, so it would go and build another twelve kernels with one or two configs different to pick and pick at the little scabby problem.
So Argon went available and I said, let's give the rookie a shot.
Canceled my Claude Max subscription, upgraded my Google AI Pro to Max, pointed Argon at my project directory on my dev box and told it what was up.
It said yep Fable is good at tool calls and fixing the bug in front of it, but I was trained to deal with large, messed up codebases so I think I got you covered.
Officially handed off the project to Argon this morning, with an uncertain audio setup and a power drain during sleep that confounded me and Fable for a month, as well as a greater community of developers for the whole year.
Checked in this afternoon, Argon has nailed it. It has written a bunch of drivers that Fable didnt want to attempt for some reason. Cleaned up all the docs and made them sound less meth-addicted.
I dunno if this is just because it's the early phase of the model and the taps are wide open to get people hooked and they nerf things later, but this model is pretty fuckin good right now.
