Honestly -- the thing that has impressed me the most about Fable is how diligent it is about testing its own changes. I think this is exactly what Simon is picking up here - Fable is absolutely heckbent on screenshotting that darn scroll bar and will stop at NOTHING until it manages it! In my own use I was also impressed how it proactively installed Playwright and set it up to test a FE change. The previous models treated testing more as an afterthought, which I thought was annoying. I always had to tell them to do it, and then sometimes I would get lazy and skip it. I've noticed Fable go to similar extremes when testing other things - like actually deploying my app to exercise new APIs, etc. It makes the results much better. The downside is that tasks take much longer - but that doesn't matter because we were all using worktrees / remote control to do other work asynchronously, right? Right?
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#82Obviously 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
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It seems that you've not worked out how to harness the LLM as a tool to improve your qualified knowledge and abilities in a domain, and have instead focused on whether or not its a crutch for lack of knowledge or laziness.
When paired with your skill and knowledge, it is a force multiplier. You maintain control, the ability to direct, structure, strategise, and refine.
That some are using it as the entire brain does not mean that this is how everyone is using it, or how you must use it. The models can be fantastic at breaking past certain issues, surfacing qualified information, and surfacing related distributed information to help you acquire it and pick up what you need on niche topics quickly. Something as basic as copilot hooked into sharepoint can make life a lot easier when you are in a big org. Something like claude code or codex can be great at hunting down issues in an unfamiliar code base rapidly. Whether or not you outsource the thinking component is entirely up to you, but ignoring the productivity side of the tool because it can do some of the thinking is a case of focusing too hard on the negative.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#83> 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…
Which agent sandbox do you recommend?
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#84Immediately I thought “isn’t this just an overflow issue?” Amazing how far these models still have to go and also how many people don’t know basic CSS.
Learn to center a div
Copy and paste code from stack overflow until the div is centered
Ask AI to center it
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#85> 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 continually bemused and astonished
I'm not. Everyone is told to get 10X the amount of shit per day done these days. Safety checks are out the window at that point.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#86It is interesting to me that Anthropic are more concerned about the "safety" of distillation training other LLMs, and not as much about an unscrupulously aggressive goal-oriented solver that will do whatever it can to reach its goal, even if violates any kind of sandbox you might have reasonably expected.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#87For 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.
> If i have a really hard problem or big refactor, i use workflows.
What is a "workflow"? Is this some kind of new feature?
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#88> 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…
Its how the chimp brain works. Its not a single system but multiple systems making predictions for different time horizons. when output doesnt align we get stories to manufacture coherence.
Plato gave us his Chariot analogy with 2 horse pulling in diff directions 3000 years ago. Today we got System 1/System 2, Elephant Rider model etc.
The human mind thanks to how its own architecture handles unpredictability in the universe will generate contadictions.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#89admittedly, i've not really cracked FE dev with LLMs at this point (and it's probably my big weakness). but, i'd heard somewhere that FE just isn't there yet - though i was suspicious of that claim.
i'm torn about sending screenshots to an LLM for debugging - seems imprecise. seems lossy, especially compared to inspecting the dom. however, it's always proved good enough (e.g. when messing with ratatui.rs and tui-pantry). similarly for web, maybe it's about decomposing into storybook. hmm. the next grand adventure i need to hack.
anyway, fascinating investigation of fable just automating that entire process and what it didn't automate, too.
* disclaimer: these are actually my hyphens.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#90Immediately I thought “isn’t this just an overflow issue?” Amazing how far these models still have to go and also how many people don’t know basic CSS.
$12 and 200k tokens!