Expert takes Aug 24, 2026

This week · posted August 23

A practitioner-writer says the free lunch is over — and we are not treating it as evidence for the judgment in main line item 2.

Drew Breunig is an independent writer on data strategy and applied AI who has long covered the trade-offs between model capability and practical engineering. In "Fable & The End of the Free Lunch" he writes that before Fable, working hard on your own coding harness and context strategy did not pay, because a new model always arrived at the same price or cheaper and covered most of your problems for you. After Fable landed, it was strong but expensive enough that his team began thinking about which work should go where, since a cheaper tier is already good enough for most of their code (dbreunig.com, 08-23; we reached it through Simon Willison's citation page).