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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#3
> But on the other hand... this is a robust reminder that coding agents can do anything you can do by typing commands into a terminal—and frontier models know every trick in the book and evidently a few that nobody has ever written down before.

> Running coding agents outside of a sandbox has always been a bad idea

I'm continually bemused and astonished by the number of people who clearly acknowledge that it's reckless to give agents full access to your machine, and keep doing it anyway.

It's like posting a video of yourself in the passenger seat of a car, with your feet up on the dashboard, and saying: "Remember, if you're doing this and you get in a crash, the airbags are likely to break your legs or worse! Boy, I sure am glad that didn't happen to me!"

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#4
Isn't that something you just open a devtools for and have fixed in like 2 minutes?

For me, it got frustrated debugging on a real LPDDR4 controller/phy and having me in the loop slowing it down, so it wrote an HW emulator to be able to run the original LPDDR4 training aarch64 binary from the manufacturer, to see what register writes it was making and to compare with the opensource rewrite it was implementing.

Mildly amusing. :)

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#5
Yeah, I had to modify my work flow to make sure agents can't push to or access prod in ANY way. I haven't had it happen but I'm sure it's very possible that if you tell an agent that you have certain issue in prod, it will try to escape any sandbox and try to get access to prod to do testing and changes there.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#6
Fable + Ultracode has found a bunch of bugs and issues for me when the workflow agents are doing their exploration. Also the "adversarial" agent seems to surface a lot of interesting stuff. It's definitely proactive, the plan + implementation cycle can take an hour. It has one-shot features I want to add with 100% success.

Having said that I wouldn't use it over Opus 4.8 for "smaller" things. With everything cranked up it's definitely an extravagant use of tokens.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#7
post #3

> But on the other hand... this is a robust reminder that coding agents can do anything you can do by typing commands into a terminal—and frontier models know every trick in the book and evidently a few that nobody has ever written down before. > Running coding agents outside of a sandbox has always been a bad idea I'm continually bemused and astonished by the number of people who clearly acknowledge that it's reckle…

The analogy extends to driving generally. Everyone knows it's very dangerous but people keep doing it.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#8
Fable feels like a version of Opus running on a harness that won't let it halt until it's sure the issue is fixed, which makes sense if what you want is a model that's better at benchmarks.

It's a very good model, but it comes at a huge premium: not only do the tokens cost more, but the model itself really wants to spend them all. For example, working with React Native, Fable never just says "okay, I did the thing, that's it." It tries to rebuild the entire app from scratch, run the whole test suite, and watch every log and warning.

This is the first time with LLMs I've felt that upgrading to a model isn't worth it, even if my company lets me use it, because all the building / testing was just destroying my machine and its battery, which keeps me from working on other things.

For now, it feels like Opus with ultracode is a better choice (less pollution of the main context, more parallelism in investigations).

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#9

Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

I'm convinced this is going to be the summary of the 2020 decade...

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