Morning friend ☕️

Last week, I promised you a new series The Builder’s Workshop.

But playing around with Fable 5 was too exciting for me to pass up as a topic of discussion here.

The evidence? a screenshot telling me I had used my entire weekly Claude Fable 5 allowance:

I can still use it from here, but the cost is too steep right now.

So long, Fable 5.

It was good while it lasted.

But why was it good?

AI’s been around forever, so what’s so exciting about it?

Grab your coffee.

Let’s chat!

Perhaps you’ve been watching people online build apps, launch businesses, and create AI agents before breakfast.

Meanwhile, you’re still trying to grasp the basics.

Understandable.

The pace is intimidating. Every week brings a new tool and another person announcing that everything has changed again.

I’m an engineer by training, but I’m no AI expert. I still have a demanding day job while trying to finish the book, publish this blog, build Scary Management, and raise a family.

I’m experimenting because my time is limited.

Writing a book involves more than words.

There are characters, timelines, plots, continuity, and years of decisions to align.

Until recently, that knowledge lived in my head and across Google Drive files. Tracking it manually could add years to a book already three years in the making.

So, using ChatGPT’s Codex, I built a small editorial “team”: AI agents, workflows, and knowledge files.

One agent understands the characters and canon. Another checks changes against the story doctrine. Others review pacing or continuity.

The goal is not to let AI write the book for me.

The goal is to manage the workload while keeping the voice, judgment, and final decisions mine.

Codex built the original workshop.

Then Fable 5 changed what I thought was possible.

I pointed Fable 5 at the existing system and asked it to understand how it worked, identify strengths and gaps, and recommend improvements.

It examined the agents, workflows, and knowledge files as one system.

Then I asked it to turn that analysis into a practical enhancement plan: help me finish a better book, faster, without losing control of the story or my voice.

It prioritised the changes and created a route towards that outcome.

I did not use a fully autonomous loop and leave it to execute everything on its own.

I still carried out every part of the plan manually.

For each stage, I asked Fable 5 for the exact prompt. I ran it, reviewed the result, approved or corrected the change, then moved on.

I remained in control.

But because the plan was so well structured, I no longer had to invent every next step myself.

The outcome? My engine now has the gaps plugged and I can focus on the creative work of building out the novel without worrying that I’m quietly breaking fundamentals like doctrine, canon, plot etc.

The shift with Fable 5 is that earlier models were most useful after I had broken a project into tasks.

It could inspect the project, understand the destination, and help design the journey.

AI is beginning to move from:

“Give me the next task.”

Towards:

“Tell me what success looks like, and I’ll help work out how to get there.”

You may be carrying an idea you have never fully acted on.

Something at the intersection of what you care about, what you are good at, and what could help someone else.

Call it purpose, Ikigai, or the thing you return to when the noise dies down.

Perhaps it is a book, business, course, service, community, or solution to a problem you understand deeply.

The idea may feel too ambitious or too far outside your day-job identity.

Until recently, the gap between idea and execution was enormous. You needed money, technical skills, or a team you could not afford.

That gap is shrinking.

AI cannot give you purpose or manufacture the conviction that makes your idea worth pursuing.

But it can help you move from thought to experiment, blank page to first draft, scattered notes to a plan.

Your experience may be your advantage.

AI brings growing capability to build.

You bring context and judgment.

The most capable models are still expensive.

I used up my included Fable 5 allowance quickly. Continued use would mean paying separately, and long projects consume credits fast.

A builder does not use the most powerful tool for every job.

You don’t use an industrial saw to sharpen a pencil.

Use expensive models for difficult planning, move routine work to cheaper tools, and set spending limits.

For now, I’ll use Fable 5 when it’s back on normal subscription access. The lower model Opus is perfectly fine to help me with writing, and tweaking the editorial engine further.

But for the initial build/optimization of my engine, Fable 5 was the bees knees.

The costs will come down. Frontier capability will eventually become normal in cheaper models.

There is a more important problem to deal with in the mean time…

The biggest obstacle is no longer be access to the building tools.

It is remembering that you are creative in the first place. A builder.

Long before you became an employee, specialist, manager, or responsible adult, you played, experimented, and imagined things that did not yet exist.

That instinct does not vanish. It becomes quieter.

Responsibilities pile up. Time gets scarce. Years of work teach you to wait for someone else to define the problem, assign the task, and approve the solution.

You begin to see yourself as the person who executes somebody else’s plan.

That is the employee mindset I am trying to unlearn.

Not responsibility. The belief that building belongs to founders, inventors, artists, engineers, or people with more time and money than you do.

AI is making the tools more accessible.

But the harder shift happens inside you.

You have to recover the curiosity to ask what could exist and the confidence to treat the first version as an experiment, not a verdict.

That is what my next five posts will explore: not the engineering behind my editorial engine, but the mindset behind becoming a builder again.

I’m not writing this as an expert.

I’m writing it as someone with a day job, a full life, too much to do, and an idea I care about enough to keep building.

Perhaps there is an idea inside you waiting for the tools to catch up. And they are catching up.

The next step is allowing yourself to begin.

And if you want to begin, come along with me.
The Builder’s Workshop series starts next week.

See you there!
Vaugan