The prompt and information given are extremely generic, "here solve this problem - screenshot" - conclusion Fable is relentless? It used the tools at its disposal to solve the problem you gave it. "Claude was running in a folder that contained the source code for the application." Well you ran it there didn't you? "extreme lengths to get the information that it needed" No, those aren't extreme lengths - you gave it a generic task - and it solved it using tools and the resources it could discover. Extreme would be you gave it a CTF challenge and the VM didn't boot so it found a vulnerability in the host, exploited the hypervisor, booted the guest VM meanwhile reading the flag directly from the host (pre-fable/mythos).
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#352As you note, I wonder to what extent this is a harness issue? I've been experimenting with different harnesses for local models, and with (IIRC) Hermes and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B I was amazed the lengths it went to (writing test code, opening it in a browser, screenshotting, analysing the screenshot, exploring multiple pages of an existing website again with screenshots/analysis) to solve a query I would have naively expect…
Absolutely is. The “Shelly” harness from exe.dev could already do the same thing, creating pages and debugging them, while having full system access, months ago with Sonnet 4.5
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#353This to me reads like a poignant commentary on the catastrophic loss of human agency, with the actual commit being highly revealing [0]. Author wants to hide a horizontal scrollbar. Any junior frontend dev worth their salt will be asking right away "where do I stick `overflow-x: hidden;`?" A complete solution will then require hitting "Inspect element" in the browser to find the CSS class and running (rip)grep to fin…
This is exactly right. By offloading this trivial task to the LLM, Simon has abandoned the opportunity to evaluate the abstraction with additional information and improve it. Instead, we let the agent spend $12 and make the fix while learning nothing.
I see it as a prioritization exercise. I know the above is a trivial example, but more generally, does the guy who wrote Datasette and Django want to wrangle front end and css, or do they want to work on something else?
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#354Be careful of storing production ssh keys in your laptop, it will find a way to find them :/
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve picked an interesting example, as driving a car, even with all safety precautions, is pretty much the most dangerous activity we do on a daily basis. Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice bu…
Are there real acknowledgments cases of multiple companies coming together to bribe some state level people to increase their profit and splitting the bribe across the companies?
Like GM, BNW and Honda coming together bribing and splitting the bill. Seems unlikely thou there was a RAM price fixing agreement caught but then again they were caught cause of the number of people aware
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
The science fiction AI of my childhood was Cortana, who was a lot more cool than a relentlessly proactive token torcher which burned 12 bucks to fix some CSS.
You can literally make Cortana with modern LLMs. Or something close to it. Especially as models like this are trained: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/
I think GP meant Cortana from the Halo video game series and not the start menu bar widget
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#357It feels like Fable is slightly smarter but overall worse tool exactly due to this.
It's constantly turning what should be 50 LOC patch of a single prompt into 30 minute exploration that is totally not worth it. Often wrong even.
I trialed it on some rather simple stuff - backfill redis dedupe cache when the hash function changed: instead of running new hash func on every db value to expand the cache it implemented some overly-complex cache update that tried to guess hashing func version of each cached value and recalculate only the old hashes. I can imagine in some context this would make sense maybe? but not 30 minutes of token burn that got replaced by 10 lines for loop by me.
I fear that this is generally bad news for programming. LLM tech is clearly running into a diminishing returns wall on intelligence but a response to that is to just make them more relentless which is a pretty poor solution for everyone involved, except I guess people who sell the tokens and people who can afford these tokens to scan for 0-days.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#358I had a similar experience, I was working on a jupyter notebook, and Claude knew that it could write code that would use a DSN with read-only database access so I could run it. Opus just plugged along. First Fable session with it, it tried to go looking for that DSN so it could get the connection string and run a query itself. Luckily the auto classifier caught and stopped it.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice bu…
I don't think the pressure of the auto lobby is really the reason. People feel cars are more convenient and more prestigious than riding on a bus. Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA.
NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pijp’s) resistance to cars and car lobbying.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#360I find there's an interesting tension with these models - they're very "resourceful" at finding ways to do things with the tools they have, but it'd also be a lot more useful to me if I could see / permit exactly what they're trying to do. Claude will very happy produce bash commands to run sed or whatever to read part of a file, which prompts for permission each time - if it was using a specific read_file tool it'd be easier to say 'allow all of this' (It does actually have such a tool but maybe it isn't flexible enough for many use cases?).