GPT-6 Astra against Fable 5.1: two turbulent launches in one week and no model arrives in one piece

By Javi and Rafa, on the last Hawaiian Friday of the year · Café con Codely

Fable 5.1 came out on September 1. It costs the same as Fable 5, but cache reads in the API are 75% cheaper. Rafa used it all week and gives his verdict: it speaks plainly again, it writes better code and it is a bit faster. The main new feature is that a change of effort no longer breaks the cache. His recommendation: work in low and raise the effort only when the task needs it.

But Fable also brought a problem. A bug caused cache misses, and the Claude Code status line warned about more cache writes than cache reads. Rafa reached 92% of his weekly quota three days after a reset. The Claude Code update from this morning says it fixes the bug. The chat has a clear opinion: if they break the cache, they owe a new reset.

GPT-6 Astra arrived yesterday. OpenAI trained it to use the computer: cursor, keyboard, Blender and 3D reasoning. The whole launch post talks about that and not about code. The rollout is so slow that neither Javi nor Rafa have the model yet. Sam Altman apologized and Thibault Sottiaux announced one accumulated reset for each day without access.

The hosts compare the two cultures. OpenAI has more servers and compensates each error with resets. Anthropic is very short on compute and does not do it. From what they have read so far, Astra matches Fable in reasoning and is a bit behind in code. Fable is still the number one model for programming. Watch in the video.

The Evernote legacy: 750 machines provisioned by hand and a Java 11 monolith

Gergely Orosz interviewed the CTO of Bending Spoons, the Italian company that buys declining SaaS products. When they bought Evernote in 2023 they found 750 machines provisioned by hand, each one with its own name. The whole product lived in a Java 11 monolith with very bad response times. Javi now understands why Evernote spent years without new features.

Bending Spoons has a reputation as the villain because each purchase brings layoffs. The interview shows the other side: they buy oversized companies and make them efficient at the technical level. Their latest acquisition, on August 4, is Airtable. Watch in the video.

Google deletes Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store and Brave hosts them

On August 31 Google completed the last milestone of its plan. Manifest V2 extensions, such as uBlock Origin, no longer exist in the Chrome Web Store. Until now they stayed there for the browsers that still support that manifest. Now you must download the binary from GitHub or the official website.

Brave decided to host four extensions so that they stay available with one click: AdGuard, uBlock Origin, uMatrix and NoScript. Rafa has a theory about security as an excuse. Google earns between 30 and 60 dollars per user per year from ads. Without an ad blocker that revenue can grow by 30 or 40%. Watch in the video.

The utility of the week

CleanShot X 5.0

The screenshot tool that Javi has used for more than a year releases version 5.0. It adds video recording with cursor zoom and an embedded editor, in the style of Screen Studio. It costs 39 dollars with one year of updates. Rafa resisted conversion for a year and now says he will buy it, to record quick videos and share them sooner.

cleanshot.com

The chat weighs in

ciltocruz: So there is a bug, they know it, they fix it, and they do not give a reset?

YonkTodorcevic: That chart looks outdated, Gemini Flash 3.8 is the latest one

ianenri: A Dilbert strip or some other geek comic to replace the proverb section

Agenda

Apple event: iOS 27 and the new Siri · 2026-09-09
Software Crafters Barcelona 2026, with the café live from BAU · 2026-10-16

The song of the week

Rafa: «Afraid to Feel» — LF SYSTEM (He heard it in the background of a shop, opened Shazam and saved it. He loves the rhythm change at second 16.) Watch in the video.

Javi: «Nunca Será Siempre» — Bely Basarte feat. Rayden (He loves how Rayden writes: the song tells a story and presents the characters before it starts.) Watch in the video.

The café's music playlist: cdly.to/playlist

The saying of the week

«Ni moza fea ni vieja hermosa»

Literally: no young woman is ugly and no old woman is beautiful. Youth always has appeal, even if it does not last. The hosts are not convinced: it is the third week in a row that the multilingual proverb book disappoints. They decide to retire the section and ask the chat for ideas to replace it. Watch in the video.

More Codely

Event Bus en Kafka: diseño de infraestructura

Codely did not recommend Kafka as an event bus because it was born for data streaming. KIP-932 changes that: share groups bring messages with state, retries and dead letter in Kafka 4.4. The course explains how they work inside and how to design your event system with them.

The joke of the week: I was going to tell you a joke about DNS, but it would take you about 24 hours to get it.

All the news we covered

#CaféConCodely · @CodelyTV · Previous cafés: cdly.to/cafe

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