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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#451

Post by justusthane »

pjungwir wrote: post #309
teraflop wrote: 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 know there are VM solutions, but I've been happy with a separate OS user (named `claude`). He has similar dotfiles to mine, but no secrets. My own home directory is 0700. He has his own ssh key that I added to my github profile, but it's password-protected, and I push/pull for him. He has his own Postgres (non-superuser!) {development,test} {users,databases}. It's as if he were another developer on the project. If…

That’s a really interesting and pretty neat approach. How do you communicate with it? Just su to that user? Or tmux?

Although I can’t help but think that a VM is still more convenient, more flexible, and more secure.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#452

Post by AmbroseBierce »

simonw wrote: post #399
oulipo2 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Here's a handy calculator you can use to estimate how much CO2 and water I wasted with my coding agent session: https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

This very obtusely ommits the demand for new data centers and related infrastructure that using AI creates, the going "vegan for a year" option assumes less cows being born but somehow the "don't use AI" doesn't assume that the data center wasn't build in the first place.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#453

Post by TaupeRanger »

PinkaDunka wrote: post #438
simonw wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a handy calculator you can use to estimate how much CO2 and water I wasted with my coding agent session: https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

Not sure what point you wanted to make, but this calculator is quite shocking. GPT 5.5 pro, with "a long document" and 10 requests a day gives 25% of daily CO2 emissions! Ten coding sessions a day with Opus is still 4.7%! This feels enormous. I will definitely stop rolling my eyes when people complain about AI CO/water usage...

What are you on about? May be 1 out of 100,000 users are using 5.5 Pro to make 10 "Long Documents" as defined in that tool EVERY day. What a silly thing to harp on.

Six 100,000 token Claude coding sessions use less energy than a dryer load, and less water than making one egg. If you are truly concerned about energy and water usage, AI is not even in the top 100 things you should be concerned about in your daily life.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#454

Post by lionkor »

When prompted like this:

> What could be the reason for a horizontal scrollbar appearing inside a ? Come up with a single likely fix path. Keep it terse.

ChatGPT instantly responded with some speculation and then the same exact fix, with zero access to the code or a browser or anything. It also included ways to fix it by removing code, saying:

> Likely cause: the textarea is rendering long unbroken text while horizontal overflow is allowed, often via inherited CSS such as white-space: pre, overflow-x: auto, or disabled wrapping

Which is certainly possible and would be an even cleaner fix.

Maybe we've lost the plot guys. We've reached max stupid.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#456

Post by Ummmdf »

simonw wrote: post #423
biztos wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might also ask why a bunch of static CSS inside a bunch of JavaScript is hiding inside __init__.py[0] - hopefully before trying to fix some detail of the CSS. (I'm surprised to see it actually, since my own use of Claude has mostly yielded well-structured code. But I'm not doing proper vibe-coding, more like friendly Socratic arguing with another engineer who happens to be a robot.) [0] https://github.com/datase…

Thanks for the prod, I've extracted that script out into a separate static file: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/fa505b82... (It was in Python because there were a couple of URLs that needed to be dynamically constructed by the server, but those are output as a small window.datasetteAgentJumpConfig object instead now.)

[dead]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#458

Post by Sharlin »

I remember back in the 2010s the debates between "oracle" and "agent" AGIs, and the arguments that AGIs that only answer questions would be safe and certainly nobody would ever be stupid enough to just let an AGI out of a sandbox, never mind to the greater internet, and give it tools to do whatever it thinks is needed to reach a goal.

Us circa 2026: "Hold my beer"

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#459

Post by solenoid0937 »

saberience wrote: post #403
simonw wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things I learned from this: - Fable will do a whole lot more than you might expect in order to verify a fix. I learned that it's "relentlessly proactive". That's a good title for a blog entry! - You can take screenshots of a window in macOS using the "screencapture" CLI command, but you'll need the integer window ID first. - That windowID is accessible via "Quartz.CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo(Quartz.kCGWindowListOption…

And Fable is still worse than Codex. I use both and the only thing (as always) that I will use Claude for is UI design. Opus 4.8 and now Fable are still both worse at actually getting the job done than the Codex model. Claude models write FAR too much code when it's not needed, they burn far too many tokens, when they are not needed, write un-necessary tests, write plans which are 5 pages longer than are needed, etc.…

I don't know what problems you're working on but Fable is not just better, it is a step change from GPT 5.5 in my experience. It feels at least one major model generation ahead.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#460

Post by elicash »

bananaquant wrote: post #338

This 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…

I misread your comment at first and thought you were insulting Simon Willison, rather than calling Claude Fable a bad developer, and so I'm commenting here to clarify it in case others also misread it.

That first sentence threw me off.

Anyway, I'm glad he spent the $12 because this blog post was highly informative.

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