Fable & The End of the Free Lunch

There’s some talk today about how agentic coders are balking at Anthropic’s pricing and adopting alternatives. I was reminded of a thought I had in the weeks following Fable’s release: the free lunch was over. When Moore’s Law was in full effect, it didn’t make sense to ruthlessly optimize your code. In 18 months, a CPU would arrive that would double your performance. Herb Sutter famously referred to this as, “the free lunch,” in a seminal essay. When Moore’s Law slowed in the mid-2000s (specifically, single-threaded performance stagnated), we suddenly had to think about parallelization, archi