Claude Code Fable and a Community Event

I joined a Claude Code community event themed around pushing Fable 5 as far as it can go. The other participants’ projects were inspiring, and I came home with a few genuinely interesting realizations.

Peripherals can widen what you build

One quiet worry of mine has been that the things I make tend to end as one-offs — they don’t grow into anything. Then I met a participant who was clearly having a great time combining things: an M5Stack talking to her Mac, wearables like the Even G2 as inputs and outputs, all wired into her own apps. Maybe my one-off problem comes from trying to make everything begin and end inside the Mac. When you reach out of the screen — causing some small change in the physical world, or sensing one — the layer you can touch changes. It smelled like interesting territory.

A different kind of personal

Some participants build things meant to be used by many people eventually. But what struck me was how many were freely building niche things for an audience of exactly one: themselves. Tailor-made systems and apps. There’s the familiar pitch of “local AI handles your personal data safely,” which is one way to aim at the personal — but using an advanced intelligence like Fable to build whatever you want, purely for your own delight, is personal AI too.

What “building the system” means

It was a week of thinking about systems — building things now, while Fable is available on a subscription, that will keep paying off later. I’d also noticed my ideas were being quietly constrained by questions like “is there an API or MCP for that data?” One speaker shared that the Even R1’s health data is currently locked away from external use — and that they wanted to ask Fable to analyze the API and open it up anyway. There may be terms-of-service problems with that. But the refusal to think only within what you’ve been handed — that’s genuinely beautiful. And for conflicts with terms: if it’s private, personal use, and if it ultimately pushes the vendor toward a more secure offering, maybe that’s fine. I want to keep that unconstrained way of thinking close.

A good event, full of good realizations. My thanks to the organizers.