> How much time do you spend on your setup vs getting a lot of stuff shipped by paying for Fable 5?

Relatively speaking, quite little (and it's more interesting than some of the stuff I'm otherwise shipping), I mostly just explored to see what's available.

I also agree that non-SOTA models are risky, that's why I was shopping around for them as well - DeepSeek V4 Pro is cheap but unreliable, GLM 5.2 is around and maybe slightly past Sonnet quality (though their quotas are a bit of a problem), whereas Kimi K3 is a proper contender.

I did write a tool to manage 3rd party providers for Claude Code: https://ccode.kronis.dev/

However, in the end I figured out that for the terminal use cases OpenCode is really comfy (provider TUI solutions are okay).

For web/desktop based stuff I like the UI of Claude Code Desktop, though ZCode comes close too (which is surprising, they sorta came out of nowhere and are patching the thing weekly), meanwhile Kimi Code and OpenCode desktop/web offerings still aren't great, but are functional.

I actually did write a bit more about my experiences on my blog.

GLM 5.2 with their harness and coding plan: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model...

Kimi K3 with their Allegro 100 USD plan and harness: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/kimi-k3-is-out-is-anthropic-don...

That exploration let me switch over to Kimi fully because the tone of Anthropic's models is insufferable: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/ai-slop-is-a-self-inflicted-tra...

Not to spam too much, but maybe those experiences are useful to someone. Long story short, most harnesses are okay but shopping around a little bit is definitely a good idea, the same way how spending some time choosing a font isn't a bad thing if you'll stare at it for 8 hours a day. I'm also happy that I managed to find software that's okay to run and also a model whose tone I actually enjoy, that is still near-SOTA in performance and that I can throw tasks at it without worrying about whether the model is or isn't good enough at those.

I will admit that I'm probably slightly overspending by moving over fully to Kimi, there's probably a plateau for each kind of task and not everything needs SOTA models, but at least this way I don't have to think much about it.

Kimi K3 Is Competitive with Fable; Kimi K3 and Fable Is SoTA