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AI systems
Claude Fable 5.1 in Plain English
What actually changed in the September release, which of the five effort levels to use for which job, and the two kinds of work worth re-attempting now that long jobs cost a quarter of what they did.
Otomatic Guide by Natan Trolka
- Topic
- AI systems
- Reading time
- 13 min read
- Format
- Web and PDF
A new AI model launches roughly every six weeks and the coverage is always the same: a wall of benchmark percentages, a leaderboard, and no answer to the only question a business owner has, which is whether any of it changes what you should be doing on Monday. This one does change something, and it is not the part that got the headlines.
- Explain, in one sentence to a colleague, what got cheaper and why it is not the price you see advertised.
- Pick the right setting out of five for a given job, instead of leaving everything on the expensive one.
- Run a twenty-minute test on your own work that tells you which setting you can live on.
- Recognise the two kinds of job that were not worth paying for last month and are worth another look now.
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What the guide covers
What actually changed
Two things moved. One is a price cut hidden below the headline, and the other is a setting that finally does what it claims.
The four words you need
Token. A chunk of text, roughly three quarters of a word. AI is billed per million of them. When you see a price like 10 dollars per million tokens, read it as about 10 dollars per 750,000 words.
Why 25 cents matters more than 10 dollars
On a short question the cache barely registers. On a long job it is most of what you pay.
Written by
Natan Trolka
Founder, Otomatic Digital
Natan builds AI systems for owner-led businesses in Ireland and the UK. Every guide here comes out of work that shipped for a client.
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