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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#71

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…

It’s a pretty glowing review about a product that costs money with a two-sentence “Watch out!” at the end of it. Seems pretty reasonable to mention how much money it burned through given that “it’ll circumnavigate the globe instead of walking next door” has a direct concrete measurable effect (cost) unlike theoretical damage.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#72
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…

It took two decades for the web to deprecate SSL for TLS and serve over HTTPS by default.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#73
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…

[dead]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#77

do you have any data you can share on how many input and output tokens were used in that whole process to fix that bug?

  ~ % uvx agentsview session usage be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b
  Session:       be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b
  Agent:         claude
  Output:        68606
  Peak ctx:      113178
  Cost:          ~$12.11 (claude-fable-5, claude-opus-4-8)

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#78
post #58

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

... so the mechanic produced an invoice, itemized. changing the CSS - $0.05 knowing which CSS to change - $30

overflow is CSS 101

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#79

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.

I've been consistently getting about $100 worth of Fable usage daily, on my $100/month subscription.

I'm not looking forward to June 22nd when the subscription stops working for Fable!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#80

Earlier 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…

Having worked in places across both extremes (software engineer doing lots of other things including BD, hardware, ops, etc. to just being a JIRA ticket machine monkey), I am suspicious that HN readership is biased towards the former and frankly the bulk of "software engineers" in the world _willingly_ exist in the latter category. I didn't experience the latter until later in my career and God Almighty was it uncomfortable, but I think if AI were to displace some subset of "software engineers" it would those (they also seem to overwhelmingly dislike writing any prose whatsoever, which to me is a major tell). Many, many software engineers outside of hotshot shops seem either incapable or profoundly averse to "asking the questions" as you say.
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