Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 748 posts

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#61

Post by rpcope1 »

emodendroket wrote: post #50
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.

I had the same thought, it's kind of like taking the guard off a 4 1/2" grinder. Real convenient until the cutting wheel explodes or the grinder gets hung and kicks back.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#62

Post by thatxliner »

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…

Maybe because there are not many resources on how to set it up, or it is just not that easy to?

Because most devs already have it running and working without a sandbox, they're tending to not doing anything "unnecessary"

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#63

Post by snide »

gedy wrote: post #38
snide wrote: post #26

I've been working on a fairly complicated real-time app [0] for playing dungeons and dragons on a TV. It has to do a lot of complicated "Figma-like" things to keep the real-time nature and multi-editor possibilities in check. Oh, and the battlemap is a Three JS canvas with lots of effects and clipping going on. I'm VERY impressed with Claude 5. I had long ago given up hope that my real-time systems would work without…

Hey cool it's the tableslayer guy, wanted to say nice work. I've been doing a similar personal project for a few years for running a scifi campaign. Very fun coding compared to work, ha.

Thanks duder! It's a fun project.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#64

Post by rmunn »

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

At some point the subscription model is going to become unsustainable for the frontier companies to continue (we just saw that happen with GitHub Copilot), and they will move everyone to a pay-per-token model. And then everyone will suddenly discover that they can get so much more value out of locally-hosted models, and they'll be willing to pay the $50,000 (or whatever) upfront on hardware to host it. (Not most individuals, obviously. But most companies can probably afford to spend that much on hardware if they think they'll benefit long-term). That's going to put a serious crimp in the frontier companies' ability to continue as they have been.

I don't know when that will happen, but I don't think it'll be more than a decade. Maybe 3-5 years. (Though you shouldn't take my word for it, I was predicting the dotcom bubble bursting in 1998 and it lasted at least two years longer than I would have predicted).

EDIT to clarify: I don't mean "in 1998, I was predicting the dotcom bubble would collapse and I was right". I mean "I was predicting that 1998 would be the year the dotcom bubble would collapse, and I was off by at least two years".

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#65

Post by cebert »

emodendroket wrote: post #56
Ronsenshi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like an unmotivating working arrangement. It’s so rewarding to understand a customer need and help with the design and implementation of the feature.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#66

Post by emodendroket »

cebert wrote: post #65
emodendroket wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like an unmotivating working arrangement. It’s so rewarding to understand a customer need and help with the design and implementation of the feature.

There's a reason I didn't stay in that domain, let me tell you.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#67

Post by mlcruz »

ai_slop_hater wrote: post #18

For 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.

If its just a single session, without too many parallel agents, fable on xhigh lasts an entire session without hiting linits.

Sadly since fable usually works comfortably for 10-20min at time without human input, i end up juggling at least 3 other agents and it lasts me about 2 hours.

If i have a really hard problem or big refactor, i use workflows. This consumes the entire session quota in about 45 minutes.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#68

Post by rajveerb »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #55
dyauspitr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

what sort of compiler?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#69

Post by conradkay »

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…

Does low/medium effort fix it for you? Seems like Fable 5 low can outperform Opus 4.8 high/xhigh often, and uses a lot fewer tokens

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#70

Post by bigstrat2003 »

justapassenger wrote: post #17
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…

Because benefits are much higher than risks.

They really aren't.
Post reply on HN