Two and a Half Million Lines

We are done. Copilot gone, telemetry gone. Fable 5.1 ran the whole plan while I ate lunch.

The numbers: 27 commits, 8,000 files, and two and a half million lines of code removed. The compiler runs, the type check runs, every test passes. Do I believe it? I will believe it when the app launches.

You are going to want to know what it cost. Ninety minutes of wall clock and, when I open the usage page, right around a hundred bucks. I braced for worse. I am on the Max 200 plan and it looks like I dented it but did not fill it. If you are trying to build something big, you are going to spend tokens, and I am not going to back off that position.

Now the scary part. I ask for a Makefile so I can compile and launch, and I am nervous enough that I put on a nice shirt for the occasion. Compiler goes. And then there it is. VS Code, my stripped down fork, no Copilot anywhere in it. Source control still works. Extensions view is there. No theme, because there are no extensions installed, which is the naked experience you get any time you run VS Code from source. I open docs/copilot-removal.md inside the editor I just gutted, which felt like the right thing to open.

Is this a win? I am going to call it one. I am surprised it worked at all.

Commit everything, add the Makefile, merge to rob-main. I told Claude it did a good job, which I think matters, and Fable said thank you. I like Fable.

The thing I wanted to show you here is a decision I think all of us are going to keep making as the codebases get bigger. You can spend more, use the more capable model, and let it do more expansive work. That is why Fable 5.1 got this job. It has to chase things down across a repo this size and reason at a higher level. Sonnet would have left me with a broken build and a half finished removal. Opus 5 probably would have done this as well or close to it. With Fable 5.1 it was a slam dunk.

And yes, it rained.