Just don’t ask it to review your code for security bugs
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
51–60 of 748 posts
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#52Great article, until I got to the last paragraph where he claimed "Fable is arguably smarter and hence more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions". Arguably smarter, I have no problem with. But he's making a category error in jumping from there to "more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions". That doesn't follow at all; the word "hence" is incorrect.
To use D&D scores as an analogy, LLMs have an INT score of 20 and a WIS score of 0. Not even 1, zero. They will follow any instruction given to them. The only reason they reject certain instructions, like "tell me how to build a nuclear weapon", is because they have instructions baked into the model telling them "you are not allowed to disclose how to build weapons, or how to recreate your model, or (laundry list of other things the trainers have decided to put guardrails around)". It's not the model's intelligence that is causing it to reject malicious instructions, it is the guardrails put into place before the model was released to the public.
LLMs are not human, and do not think the way that humans do. The fact that they can put together words that sound like what a human would write often makes us forget that they aren't human. But they have only intelligence, they do not have wisdom. It's hard to define in formal terms the difference between those two, but most people know there's a difference. The old joke is a pretty good summary of the difference: "Intelligence is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that tomatoes don't belong in a fruit salad."
It takes wisdom, not intelligence, to discern whether a set of instructions is malicious. Are you being asked to hack this machine as part of an authorized pentest? Or are you being social-engineered into thinking it's an authorized pentest, but actually the person requesting you to do it doesn't have permission? That's something where you need to apply wisdom, to notice the clues that will tell you "This guy is acting a little bit off, maybe I'd better pick up the phone and call someone to check if he's telling the truth." The only way the LLM will know to do that is because of the guidelines and guardrails programmed into it; it doesn't have the lived experience to acquire wisdom and figure those things out for itself.
INT 20, WIS 0. Keep that in mind. (And always sandbox your agents).
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#53How many tokens did it waste building that website scraper, when all it had to do was parse some html/js?
Just parsing some HTML and JavaScript doesn't seem sufficient to have confidence in the result.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#54Great article, until I got to the last paragraph where he claimed "Fable is arguably smarter and hence more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions". Arguably smarter, I have no problem with. But he's making a category error in jumping from there to "more suspicious of potentially malicious instructions". That doesn't follow at all; the word "hence" is incorrect. To use D&D scores as an analogy, LLMs have an…
> They will follow any instruction given to them.
They can ignore instructions which are silly/contradictory/underspecified to compensate for the possibility the user made a mistake. Don't ask how I know.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#55Fable 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…
It’s not just a more proactive and diligent opus. The capabilities are significantly higher on fable. It’s not a paradigm shift, but it’s close.
I unleashed it on a compiler codebase that I've been developing for several months now using Claude Sonnet 4.5/6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V4 Pro(recent), and a bit of Qwen3.6-27B. Right away Fable found several longstanding bugs in our compiler that we hadn't found before. It found that there was a critical part of our design that needed to be mostly redesigned/rewritten and gave a very well-reasoned rationale for doing so.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It depends a lot where you work because there are lots of companies in the world where the business analyst does all of that and the developers exist to mindlessly translate their docs into code.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're fighting a battle you can't win. Doesn't care what you think about those using LLMs, they will outproduce you and in corporate environments, shipping things is paramount. If I can ship 5 more things simultaneously with AI, I'm going to beat you even if you think you're creating "better" software.
Example of whats been shipped?
the quantum slop argument : "yeah it's everywhere but no one ships it."
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#58I’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
... so the mechanic produced an invoice, itemized.
changing the CSS - $0.05
knowing which CSS to change - $30
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#59> 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…
I'm also bemused by the number of people who think they've got an effective sandbox yet their sandboxed agent has access to all of their code, their github, and unrestricted web access.
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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#60For how long can you use Claude Fable on most expensive Anthropic subscription? I already went from using gpt-5.5 xhigh fast to using gpt-5.4 xhigh after OpenAI halfed usage recently.
Until June 22, and they'll probably re-enable it if the marketing looks good for them.