What I Actually Built with Fable 5: Two Weeks of Output, Published in Full

So what is everyone actually using Fable 5 for? The question went around social media, and since other people’s examples are the best source of ideas, here is everything I built with it in July. I hope some of it is useful.

A WordPress theme, and a design harness

The first thing I took on was a WordPress theme — a request from a friend I had never managed to get to.

The bigger gain was not the theme itself but building out a design harness: the set of constraints and rules that keep quality and tone from drifting. Hand a design entirely to AI and you get something that looks good but resembles what everyone else is producing. The harness is my answer to that.

That structure combined with Fable 5’s ability to read between the lines meant I could build sites that matched what I had in mind. As a side effect I produced seven or eight sites in that short window. Both speed and quality went up noticeably.

A workflow for editing video subtitles

I also have a tool for video production in progress. Aiming for a shippable product sets a high bar and that part is still difficult, but as a tool for my own use it now looks likely to cut subtitle editing time by around 30%.

The awkward part is that a personal tool does not become a product as it stands. Something built around one specific application and environment is closer to know-how than to something you can sell. Building your own tools with AI got dramatically easier; the distance from there to something other people will buy is a separate problem.

Small web tools for creators

For a music assets site I run, I built a number of small web tools aimed at creators. Some are the standard kind you would expect to exist already; others are niche enough that you rarely see them. With the cost of building tools down, things too niche for anyone to have bothered with are now worth making. That is a real change.

Obsidian as an assistant, finally moving

Since the start of the year I had been trying to combine AI with the notes app Obsidian to build myself an assistant, without much to show for it. Talking it through with Fable 5 produced not only the structure but guidance on how to use it, and a substantial pile of documentation.

My own habits have not caught up with it yet, but because the structure and the documents exist, I can keep running it on ordinary models from here. Have the capable model build the system was the lesson again.

Looking back at the list

There was more — an invoicing tool that is still unfinished, brainstorming on business strategy, journaling. Laid out together, what stands out is how much went into systems and workflows rather than one-off deliverables. If you have temporary access to a very capable model and are not sure what to do with it, building the systems around your own work is where I would point you.

This article is adapted for AI Jiten from testing notes originally published on the author’s blog, Delaymania.