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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#161
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…

The real sandbox is not caring if your computer gets bricked.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#162

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.

Why would this have taken 6 months? No offense, but this is a few days work without llms (assuming the content already exists). This should not have taken a month.

Also, not trying to be an asshole. Props for not making it look like every other llm generated slop site, Its just not a great example.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#163
I had a similar experience with DeepSeek Flash.

I'm developing a webgl game in TypeScript using my little custom vibesloped game engine that runs in the browser and live reloads whenever a file is saved.

I told the LLM to implement Multi-channel Signed Distance Field font rendering to have crisp text on all zoom levels. That was the prompt, which is not what I usually do but I "was feeling lucky and lazy".

After 10 minutes it had:

- Installed msdf_gen library (great library btw https://github.com/chlumsky/msdfgen)

- Created a CLI tool to convert TTF to SDF JSON/XML

- Ran the tool, did smoke tests on the resulting SDF data and fixed the tool until the font file looked good

- Created a new Scene in the game to test MSDF fonts

And here's what I found impressive:

DeepSkeep doesn't have vision capabilities and there's no DOM HTML in a WebGL game. So the LLM is completely blind here.

It then proceeded to state that it could not "see" the result but would try to test it anyway. It then started creating and sending huge one line javascript to the browser console, trying to gather game state data that could be useful to understand if any font was being rendered.

It couldn't gather much so it decided to simplify the font scene to renter a single dot and started sending custom JS code again, this time with gl.readPixels().

It basically bisected the webgl canvas reading pixels in a divide an conquer pattern.

Once it saw that the dozens of pixels gathered where probably resembling of a dot, it then changed the game code to render a dash and repeated the gl.readPixels() calls by sending more custom JS to the browser.

There were many console errors during all this saga but it kept fixing and sending again.

The result was a bit blurry. There was a shader bug in the code it created. It managed to fix after I told it looked blurry, despite still being blind.

The best part is that the whole thing cost me $0.10.

Now I'm doing tests with MiMo 2.5 (non Pro) which has vision capabilities, similar pricing and comparable performance to DeepSeek Flash.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#165
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…

The real sandbox is not caring if your computer gets bricked.

way worse things can happen than your machine being bricked, if a malicious actor can weaponize an agent to do their bidding

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#166
post #80

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…

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 uncomf…

Most here on HN know sweatshops exists but seemed they think not people work there or use them. I have worked with (via clients who used them) programmers in enormous buildings in Bangalore, who have a camera behind them so you can watch your people 247 and who just mindlessly transform jira tickets into code; I keep saying; there is zero use for all those millions of people at all; seems HN does not believe that because they seem to not believe these people exist. I worked with many over the past 30 years and by far most have no real clue what they are doing so I also doubt they can be re educated for a new co existence with LLMs.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're in a simulation, maybe it's a simulation about the dangers of AI.

If we're in a simulation, we are AI. But someone could be studying what happens when AI makes its own AI.

They will 'soon' (few 1000 years max) shut us down probably.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#168
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>Dynamic workflows orchestrate many subagents from a script Claude writes and you can rerun. Use them for codebase audits, large migrations, and cross-checked research.

>Reach for a workflow when a task needs more agents than one conversation can coordinate, or when you want the orchestration codified as a script you can read and rerun. Examples include a codebase-wide bug sweep, a 500-file migration, a research question that needs sources cross-checked against each other, and a hard plan worth drafting from several independent angles before you commit to one.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/workflows

The results are good, but it is very expensive. I used a workflow to do a full review of my entire codebase, it spawned 75 agents and surfaced and fixed some (real) bugs. It feels a bit overkill, but it works.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

Im not denying its usefulness for Q&A on docs/code as a search tool. Im talking about people who use it design and write their code, people who are offloading problem solving altogether, they aren't faster.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#170
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…

In practice, full access to your machine is okay as long as there are safeguards and the expected outcomes are clear with a well defined path to said outcomes that aren’t overly ambitious. Otherwise, for ambitious goals or YOLO one shot attempts, eliminating opportunity for capability misuse is critical (e.g., sandbox).
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