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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#521

Post by jon-wood »

epolanski wrote: post #314
jampa wrote: 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…

> which makes sense if what you want is a model that's better at benchmarks This so much. Opus 4.6 was the last Anthropic model that was good at assisting you , 4.7 and later ones have completely inverted this relationship and it's you assisting it . Yes, I admit they are smarter, I admit we've reached a point where LLMs are more creative and could be writing better code (albeit with some design hiccups) than I do, b…

I feel like a lot of this could be solved by having a mode somewhere between Plan Mode and Execute Mode in Claude Code. Quite frequently I'll fire up Claude Code in the context of some checked out code because I want to ask some questions where having access to the source would probably be useful, I don't want it to go running off and making changes though, and I also don't really want a detailed plan for a chunk of work. I just want to ask something like "run cargo build and explain the errors to me", nine times out of ten it will indeed explain the errors but it'll then run off and start trying to fix them regardless of whether I said not to.

Essentially what I want is the experience of using Claude on the web in basic chat mode, but with the ability for it to go read my actual code and perform actions that can assist in finding answers to those questions.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#522

Post by simonw »

alecco wrote: post #519

> I was hacking on Datasette Agent today IMHO this is just AI influencer blogspam.

What, because I talked about one of my projects?

Help me out here: can you point to an article from someone's blog that showed up on Hacker News within the past few weeks that you wouldn't classify as "blogspam" and explain how it differs from the kinds of thing I write about?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#524

Post by dahart »

_heimdall wrote: post #421
beernet wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's an interesting choice as a source. It doesn't mention climate change or human impacts at all and describes El Niño as a naturally occurring event. > The El Nino is a phenomenon that occurs naturally

El Niño has been occurring naturally for more than 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_...

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#525

Post by criddell »

simonw wrote: post #103
sillysaurusx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the fix worth $12 to you?

I'd have been pretty annoyed if I'd been paying full price, hadn't paid attention and that one prompt (screenshot plus a line of text) had cost me $12! On the discounted subscription I can tolerate it, it took a small bite out of my daily allowance but not enough that I regret anything. As an LLM researcher I have no regrets at all because watching it work around the environmental restrictions was fascinating.

Reading your description of what it did, $12 seems pretty inexpensive. That's a lot of work!

If you knew up front it was a $12 fix, do you think you would have decided to just live with the scroll bar? Would have tried to fix it yourself? Do you think you would have been able to easily find and fix the problem?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#526

Post by OJFord »

simonw wrote: post #232
BosunoB wrote: post #228

Fable was trying to verify a UI change in my game. I was working in another window and noticed a program opening on my task bar. Fable had opened the game through the CLI using a movie maker tool, recorded the output, took a frame from the end of it, and used that to verify the UI. When my game's welcome screen obstructed what it wanted to see, it created a temporary worktree, deleted the welcome screen, and ran the…

Yeah, you've exactly captured one of the main problems with the model being relentlessly proactive: it will happily burn like $5 of tokens to avoid asking the human to take a screenshot or click a button for it.

Have you tried instructing it not to do that? Something like "do not branch into side projects or hacky solutions to obtain information you could ask me for. For example: if you need a screenshot of the issue, just ask me to take a screenshot rather than find a way to reproduce and screenshot it."

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#527

Post by alecco »

simonw wrote: post #522
alecco wrote: post #519

> I was hacking on Datasette Agent today IMHO this is just AI influencer blogspam.

What, because I talked about one of my projects? Help me out here: can you point to an article from someone's blog that showed up on Hacker News within the past few weeks that you wouldn't classify as "blogspam" and explain how it differs from the kinds of thing I write about?

Low effort content. You keep mention your product from the start over and over. There's not much useful information in the anecdotal post. It could've been a one-liner tweet.

Good corporate tech blogs at least give something useful or insightful for the reader and only after that they dare plug their product/service near the end.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#528

Post by isaacaggrey »

simonw wrote: post #395
risyachka wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> he would have learned nothing about the AI there is absolutely zero value in spending time to learn about new models as in few months new model will be out and whatever you learned about the current one will be useless. Also with models getting better and better you have to know less and less to achieve same results.

My experience has been the exact opposite. As the models get better you need to know more about their capabilities, because otherwise you risk prompting Claude Fable 5 like it's GPT-4o and complaining loudly about how it's all hype and nothing about these models is improving at all (yes, I do see people say that.) Getting the best results out of these models requires skill, experience, intuition, and domain expertise…

I agree but this particular example showed nothing about leveraging skill, experience, or intuition. If anything, this is another straightforward example of a one shot ask.

edit: that said, I understand this particular post is about model capability

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#529

Post by pjungwir »

justusthane wrote: post #451
pjungwir wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I su to the user. Typically I have it run a tmux session for each "project". That makes it easy to get more windows without su'ing over and over. Also its tmux sessions all get a yellow status bar (in ~claude/.tmux.conf), so they are easy to recognize.

To me it is more convenient than a VM, since everything is on the host. And it can launch its own VMs without an extra layer.

I don't really know which is more secure. There are hypervisor escape vulns too. And shared folders seem like footguns. For instance in vagrant, guests get `/vagrant` to read/write the host's folder, so you have to be careful what you put where.

The biggest annoyance with an OS user so far is running docker containers. I don't want to add claude to the docker group or give it sudo privileges. I've read that you can set up rootless docker for a user, and even that you can run it side-by-side with a normal system-wide docker, but I haven't tried doing that yet.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#530

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

jampa wrote: post #48
threatripper wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On what setting in which environment do you run it? I use the VSCode extension on Extra High and feel like it does exactly what needs to be done and stops when the thing I asked for is done. Extra comments come only when they fall into the area of code that was changed.

I tested it to fix React Native bugs in a project, comparing it with Opus. It fared better on harder bugs, taking less time to find the root cause, but after implementing a fix, it spent a lot of time and effort on validation. This was mostly unnecessary, since most of the bugs were in the JS code, so for most things, hot reloading is enough for E2E validation and to run just the right tests. No need to run a full bu…

why not just add something like: "No need to run a full build and test suite, I will manually validate"
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