Fable stopped following instructions and established workflows
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A user reported that Fable, an AI tool, stopped following instructions and established workflows after two months of use. The tool frequently paused work, claiming to await user decisions, even when no such decisions were necessary or when its own errors caused the perceived forks. The user suspects this behavior is due to an unannounced rollout of Fable 5.1, which would render the tool unsuitable for projects requiring structured and disciplined workflows.
I have been using fable for 2 months within a project.
Specifically today, i noticed significant changes in behaviour.
Same project, same chassis, same set of rules/instructions fully utilising progressive disclosure to efficiently handle context.
Today Fable:
- Paused several times during session - waiting for no input from itself or me, just stopped working - twice, this has never happened before
- Stopped following instructions: It did not read relevant catalogues, kept declaring objects/elements we had did not exist, discarded and ignored workflows, hooks, established procedures/practices - this worked flawlessly until today
- It started silently dropping or deferring items i tasked it with
- It kept stopping work due to supposedly waiting for my decision -> an example: it stopped working on all items planned in session (7) -> for each claimed there is "fork" it needs my decision on -> when i told it to present these decisions, 4 had no fork at all, 2 were result of it not following rules/missing relevant context it was supposed to have, 1 was just declaration it will do it next session.
- Completely changed style of responses / wording
- It stopped spawning specific subagents for defined tasks (implementation, troubleshooting, workflow steps - one of them being validation of "forks" that reach me whether the answer already isn't present) and kept tasks mostly to itself (against the rules, it should only act as designer/orchestrator)
It stopped pursuing goals, following instructions, discarded whole architecture we build. There was no change compared to last month in anything in the project, or well, yesterday when this worked flawlessly. No change in nature of the task(s) either.
Essentially it spent ~25% of Fable usage of x20 Max account in about 3 hours, to invent reasons to not do any work (and pause itself twice in the process).
I noticed there is expected rollout of 5.1 Fable and some users are getting this model - which would explain above (and also make it useless for my project as it demands structure/disciplined workflows).