Insanely excessive and a waste of tokens when you could have googled how to disable a scrollbar.
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
361–370 of 748 posts
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s privacy vs not. It doesn’t really need special lobbying
I’m sure that isn’t the full answer. Otherwise car ads wouldn’t be necessary and more affordable cars would outcompete the expensive ones. There’s the utility component, the prestige factor and other things.
Comfort, utility, fun, status. Every person has their own mixed requirement of those that then gets applied to their budget. Expensive for me is probably cheap for our CEO and cheap for me is probably expensive for our interns :)
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#363This 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…
[dead]
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#364I’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
I updated my post to answer that, it was $12.11 at API prices (I wasn't paying those, I have a $100/month subscription): https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/11/fable-is-relentlessly-...
Thanks!
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agreed. But I think it’s also important to realise if you sent this article back to 2020 people would say it was pure fantasy that a tool could do this. Hype aside, there’s a bit of cool magic here.
Imagining a time machine from the future arriving in 2020, of all the years, just to tell people about how sort of cool chat bots might get eventually
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#366This 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.
[flagged]
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#367Earlier 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.
The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking.
The US also had protests when drivers killed kids, but they were ultimately unsuccessful, except for the odd traffic light installation. https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-baby-carri...
Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests only barely succeeded, and it took a massive oil crisis and a population that could still (if only just) remember what life was like before cars took over their city to get there.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#368Earlier 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…
There was surely also a lot of political will coming from car users. Motorists are a large and vocal constituency.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely people feeling that way can be attributed to the industry?
No its much more straightforward, but I get it - there is no warm fuzzy feeling of discovering yet another global evil conspiracy out there set to get all of us. We are family of 4 with 2 small kids. Whenever we travel, its a series of backpacks, other bags, other stuff, and then some more. Heck, even if I travel alone its almost never just me - there are heaps of garbage to dispose, big shopping bags to bring back,…
Switzerland does have roads choked full of cars. It also has pretty mediocre bike infrastructure.
But this is kind of besides the point - even in the Netherlands I also would use a car if I were taking camping and skiing gear with the kids, and that's fine. But I can also take them in the bakfiets to the grocery store when I want, and that's also fine. Cars have their purpose, but you shouldn't _have_ to use one for basic trips.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#370This 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.
People are missing that Willison is among the very best people we have in the role of (for lack of a good name): early access to frontier models, evaluate them in real scenarios, no wishful thinking, hype, or doom, communicate the possibilities. Yes he could have fixed this himself but then he would have learned nothing about the AI, and we wouldn't have read a fascinating and important article.