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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#131
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…

I started doing it months ago and, to be honest, what the agent chooses to do isn’t unpredictable.

The problem is that different people prompt so differently.

For example, I may ask like “test different variations of this annotation on k8s pods of this service on this X cluster because it proves Y theory.”

But you know what my coworker asks? “Test Y theory.” If you were to ask two different junior engineers that, one might try random things on production and the other one might run local tests! It’s such an unguided “do anything you want as long you figure it out” request and the agent reads it like a junior who has not been told any boundaries but has been strongly told “figure it out.”

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#132
post #98

Obviously 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

Lines of code for a bugfix is a really bad proxy for effort required. You should estimate how much time it would have taken a human

5 minutes if you know CSS. And if you don’t, about the time for you to ask someone that knows CSS. In the worst case, the amount of hours to learn CSS.

So if you’re doing web pages, learn CSS.

Generally, if you’re doing something that directly involves X, learn how X works.

ADDENDUM

In most jobs, you’re going to be involved in only a few distinct technologies, learn those well and life is going to be easier. And most are transferable to the next job.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#133
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm afraid I don't understand the question. Anthropic have prices they charge for their models. These prices are what you pay if you use the API, and they are also what you pay if you are an "enterprise" customer - generally any company with 150+ employees. I haven't seen Anthropic raise the prices of an existing model after it has launched. They sometimes raise prices when they ship a model - Fable is $10/$50 where…

[flagged]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#134
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

[deleted]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example of whats been shipped?

Okay. I rebuilt my website in ~a month with the help of Opus 4.7/.8 and it would have taken me, unaided human, at least 6 months. Link's in my bio if you care. Satisfied now? Will you stop asking this question? Thought not.

So look. I’m not trying to be a dick I promise.

But I took a look at your site and I don’t know if a month would be impressive for a new and unaided dev. It looks nice but yeah.

If you’re not a dev that’s totally cool but like… all I’m saying is this may not hit like you want it to.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#136
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid I don't understand the question. Anthropic have prices they charge for their models. These prices are what you pay if you use the API, and they are also what you pay if you are an "enterprise" customer - generally any company with 150+ employees. I haven't seen Anthropic raise the prices of an existing model after it has launched. They sometimes raise prices when they ship a model - Fable is $10/$50 where…

[flagged]

Anthropic's enterprise pricing has been thoroughly covered over the last few weeks. I've talked to plenty of people who are paying those prices.

You can chose to trust me or not based on my track record.

From your posting history it looks like you have a whole lot more relevant experience with enterprise software deals than I do. Have you learned anything interesting about how Anthropic pricing works?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#137
post #127
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lines of code for a bugfix is a really bad proxy for effort required. You should estimate how much time it would have taken a human

30 seconds or a minute? Look at the diff he links to: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72... Every browser has an inspector that can show you which element is causing overflow. You walk through the tree, find the offender, and add min-width or overflow. Zero tokens, just like in the old days! Now, granted, because the garbage LLM code he’s working with has CSS inside HTML inside JavaScript in…

Yeah looking at that diff it should be very quick. My point was mostly that it was a bad metric, not if was correct or not in this particular case. I'm sure everybody's had a bugfix that took days to debug and it was just a couple of lines to fix.

Or sometimes a fix is obvious, but because it requires changing the code of a dependency, it's actually quite tedious to implement.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#138
This sounds somewhat similar to the anecdote mentioned in the Mythos Preview System Card, which mentioned that the model broke out of a sandbox and emailed a researcher while they were eating a sandwich in a park [1].

[1]: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/7624816413e9b4d2e3ba620c5a5e09...

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example of whats been shipped?

Okay. I rebuilt my website in ~a month with the help of Opus 4.7/.8 and it would have taken me, unaided human, at least 6 months. Link's in my bio if you care. Satisfied now? Will you stop asking this question? Thought not.

I'm looking at something fairly standard that can be made with a SSG. The "Written by humans" footer gave a good chuckle tho.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#140
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…

Do you think it’s dangerous to be in a car going at freeway speed? Do you ever do that anyway, even though you could be walking instead?
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