Opus Fable Playbook

fable-mode

Make Claude Opus 4.8 in Claude Code behave as much like Claude Fable 5 as
possible. The doctrine was transcribed by Fable 5 itself; hooks enforce
it at the harness level; an eval loop measures convergence against
golden Fable transcripts. Opus's reasoning depth is weights, not
config — this playbook transplants Fable's *behavior* and catches Opus's
drift mechanically; it does not close the capability gap.

Quickstart

Run one Opus-as-Fable session right now, no install:

Install from the marketplace for repeat use:

then activate with /output-style fable, or persist it by merging
profiles/opus-fable.settings.json (model, effort, thinking, output
style) into your project's or user's .claude/settings.json. Check
posture anytime with /fable-status.

SDK/headless, doctrine text only, no hooks:
--append-system-prompt "$(awk 'f;/^---$/{c++;if(c==2)f=1}' output-styles/fable.md)" —
strips the YAML frontmatter (a plain cat of the file would leak it into
the prompt). No plugin at all? Copy docs/claude-md-snippet.md into
CLAUDE.md instead.

Does it work?

Measured on 24 probes, pairwise-judged against golden Fable 5 transcripts,
with every condition scored as a multi-run mean (2–3 runs per arm) and
error bars from a dedicated variance study:
fable-mode's real wins are outcome-first framing (1.97 vs 1.88), turn
completion (1.90 vs 1.81), and comment discipline (2.00 vs 1.96); its real
losses are burying findings (1.76 vs 1.85) and one stubborn parallelism
probe (1.96 vs 2.00). The other three dimensions are statistically
indistinguishable from baseline — gaps smaller than the measured
run-to-run spread. Full tables with error bars:
docs/2026-07-04-phase-b-report.md.

Full documentation

docs/guide.md covers all of this in full:
activation details for each install…