A few days ago Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and its older sibling Mythos 5. Frontier, agentic models, able to reason for hours over enormous codebases, to use tools autonomously, to behave almost like a senior software engineer. Fable 5 came out on Tuesday 9 June; by Friday the 12th, after about 72 hours of life, it was already gone. For a few hours – actually, for a few days – it was available to everyone. Then came the silence.

A few months ago I spun up a new VPS on Linode, London datacentre. Nothing special – Debian, Nginx, a Let's Encrypt certificate, a domain I was going to use for my daily notes and my homelab experiments. No link posted anywhere, no entries in my feeds, no backlinks from the sites I run. Just a freshly assigned IP, from a subnet that a week earlier had belonged to someone else.