By Barry Buck and Claude Opus 4.8 – Last week I confessed to pulling a Mythos-class sword from the stone and using it to trim my hedges — and promised that if the dragon ever came, it would find me well practised and the blade sharp. Reader, the dragon came. They always come on a Tuesday.
Mine wasn’t really a dragon, more a beast I’ve circled for a year and change: one of those gnarled, exception-riddled automations that laughs at every clean solution you throw at it. By Friday morning Fable had it cornered and the fix was taking shape. I went to bed a hero.
By Saturday the sword was back in the stone.
A directive had come down from Washington — national security, export controls — and Anthropic, complying, switched Fable and Mythos off for everyone. I’ll spare you the rumour mill and point you at the official statement, which describes the alleged “jailbreak” as, more or less, asking the model to read a codebase and fix its flaws. The thing defenders do every day. The thing I was, at that moment, literally doing.
Here’s the part that stings. I’m South African, and the order specifically reclaims the relic from foreign nationals — so the king’s men rode out and collected the sword from exactly the village folk who’d just been handed it. I don’t blame Anthropic; they’re in the same net, and say plainly they think it’s a misunderstanding. I blame myself a little, for not swinging the thing harder while it was mine.
But the real unease is older than this week. In 26 years of building software, no government has ever decided which tools I’m allowed to pick up. Ours was the last trade that resisted “pay to win” — we told ourselves that with enough effort, and enough sleep sacrificed, open source let us build anything. Buying software to run a business was always a given; buying it to build software wasn’t, until the frontier models made doing otherwise faintly insane. Reality caught up with the people who supposedly build the reality.
And reality, when it lands, isn’t gracious about it. The boomer bureaucrats got the last word, and the message was unmistakable: this era of software is neither casual nor for trimming hedges.
My dragon still lurks. But Opus 4.8 and I have the upper hand now — Fable left its notes behind. And the hedges, you’ll be glad to know, have never looked sharper.
Barry Buck is the chief technology officer of Saucecode and Roboteur architect
www.saucecode.tech