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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#41

Post by asp_hornet »

jrflowers wrote: post #20

I’d love to know how many tokens this burned through. Did it spend $20? $30? $80? in order to > debug what was, in the end, a two-line CSS fix That detail is the difference between somebody having or not having Stockholm syndrome

The author just wrote an anecdote about how a prompt to fix an issue played out. Their conclusion wasn’t about cost or gushing at its ability but that it’s dangerous:

> Fable is arguably smarter and hence more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions. But that smartness is very much a two-edged sword: if it does get subverted by instructions, the amount of damage it can do given its relentless proactivity is terrifying.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#43

Post by bschwindHN »

megous wrote: post #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…

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

Not if you're an LLM influencer! Gotta keep up with the downpour of blog links or you'll look like you're falling behind on the latest and greatest.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#45

Post by Ronsenshi »

SecretDreams wrote: post #21
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I understand this perspective. I'll just note that as the abilities increase, the intent is to have some non -coding IC or TPM/manager literally just managing some LLMs and cutting out some software engineers. The goodness is specifically to wholly replace people who code first and foremost, at least partially. It just has to cost less tokens than the equivalent wage is the pricing goal. And people who use LLMs to ta…

The desire to get rid of software engineers is bizarre - because at the root of it, developers were there not to just write the code, but to ask right questions and based on these question build right things.

I've met in my professional life some managers or other middlemen who would be profoundly incapable of producing correct software no matter how smart of an AI agent they have access to. One of those - you don't know what you don't know.

But, I guess this is the world we live in now. Going to be Mortal Kombat for positions in companies where software engineers are actually valued.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#47

Post by latentsea »

aabdi wrote: post #37
ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Consider this. U have a website. U have to translate to xx languages. Can u write it faster than an AI? If so how much faster can u do this? Is it valuable to u? Is it valuable to a Chinese person? A Spaniard? Google Translate counts as AI.

Don't feed the troll.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#48

Post by jampa »

threatripper wrote: post #22
jampa wrote: post #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, t…

On what setting in which environment do you run it? I use the VSCode extension on Extra High and feel like it does exactly what needs to be done and stops when the thing I asked for is done. Extra comments come only when they fall into the area of code that was changed.

I tested it to fix React Native bugs in a project, comparing it with Opus. It fared better on harder bugs, taking less time to find the root cause, but after implementing a fix, it spent a lot of time and effort on validation. This was mostly unnecessary, since most of the bugs were in the JS code, so for most things, hot reloading is enough for E2E validation and to run just the right tests. No need to run a full build and test suite (which takes 10+ minutes); the CI can do this.

I switched back to Opus because of this validation quirk. Overall, Fable spent 20% of the time on coding and 80% on validation.

I think using Fable for planning and Opus for execution could be a "best of both worlds" approach (I need to test this more), but for most cases, it's not necessary, and Opus is enough.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#50

Post by emodendroket »

teraflop wrote: 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…

Well, it's a similar impulse to the way you see professional carpenters pin the guard open on a saw or do other things everyone knows you shouldn't do, except probably with a larger productivity difference and less life-altering (for the operator) consequence if it goes wrong.
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