When “Always Available” Means “Rarely Used”: What Fable 5 and Mister Donut Taught Me About Scarcity

Claude Fable 5 has officially become part of the subscription plan.

Before that happened, I felt some pressure to make the most of it before the trial period ended. Because both the deadline and the token allowance were on my mind, I actively looked for work that seemed worthy of Fable.

Then it became available whenever I wanted it, and something strange happened.

I stopped using it very much.

Of course, using it for every ordinary task would consume tokens quickly. So I tell myself that I should save it for genuinely difficult architecture or research problems.

But once I begin waiting for the perfect occasion, that occasion rarely arrives.

Most of my daily work can be completed perfectly well with Opus or Sonnet. “I can use Fable anytime, so I will save it for later” becomes a decision I repeat day after day. In the end, Fable appears in my workflow far less often than I expected.

I may actually have used it more aggressively during the trial.

So Far, the Subscription Has Worked Fine for Me

There had previously been discussion about whether Anthropic had enough computing capacity. That made me wonder whether Fable would really become reliably available through a subscription.

At least within the limits of my own usage, I have not encountered any major problems so far.

But this is only a sample size of one.

Perhaps the service feels stable precisely because I do not use it very often. My experience may be completely different from the overall usage pattern, so I cannot present it as an objective conclusion.

Still, thinking about my own behavior reminded me of something else.

The Mister Donut I Ignored Until It Disappeared

Until a few years ago, there was a Mister Donut near my home. Mister Donut is a familiar doughnut chain in Japan.

The shop was only a few minutes away on foot. I could buy doughnuts whenever I wanted.

So I almost never did.

I probably went once a year at most.

Then the shop closed.

Now there is no Mister Donut in my neighborhood. It has become something I happen to find when I am out somewhere else.

And strangely, almost every time I see one, I buy something.

By my rough estimate, I now go about once a month. I clearly buy more doughnuts than I did when the shop was just around the corner.

Scarcity Changes Perceived Value

Psychology has a familiar explanation for this behavior: the scarcity principle.

People tend to assign greater value to things that are difficult to obtain. Conversely, something that is always available can begin to feel less attractive, even when its actual usefulness has not changed.

We are vulnerable to limited editions.

Limited-time offers.

Messages saying that only a few items remain.

E-commerce sites display “Only three left” because scarcity can turn mild interest into immediate action.

Apparently, the same bias applies to AI models.

When I believed that Fable was available only for a limited time, I used it actively. The moment it became something I could access whenever I wanted, I began saving it.

Rationally, if a useful tool is available, using it should produce more value than preserving it indefinitely. But the human mind is not nearly that rational.

Fable and Mister Donut produced the same reaction in me.

While they were close and available, I barely noticed them. Once access became uncertain, they suddenly felt more desirable.

It appears that the least intelligent participant in this story is not the AI.

It is me.