*Claude Fable is relentlessly burning your dollars
There, fixed it for you.
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
551–560 of 748 posts
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
A lot of people find real value in my posts. You're an outlier here. I care a lot about not wasting people's time. I never want to post anything where a substantial portion of readers come away regretting having spent their time reading it. (OK there's an exception in that I delight in posting photos of birds on my blog, but I figure those are pretty quick for people to skip over if they don't like photos of birds!)
[deleted]
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#553One of the most frustrating things for me is when I very clearly ask a question, and it answers the question by making changes to the code.
"Is there cleaner CSS for aligning child elements to the parent's grid?"
proceeds to re-write the entire CSS file
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#554Fable + Ultracode has found a bunch of bugs and issues for me when the workflow agents are doing their exploration. Also the "adversarial" agent seems to surface a lot of interesting stuff. It's definitely proactive, the plan + implementation cycle can take an hour. It has one-shot features I want to add with 100% success. Having said that I wouldn't use it over Opus 4.8 for "smaller" things. With everything cranked…
How did you even afford to use Fable + Ultracode ? I feel like the subscription (even the $200 one) is not enough for this workflow. Are you using API or a company plan?
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#555This 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 think Fable is predisposed to try and verify it's changes. Which is a very good thing. It takes a lot of prompts to get Opus to do what Fable does unprompted.
That is exactly what I would want from a junior developer - make sure the bug exists, find a way to fix it, verify the bug is fixed.
The problem, as was correctly identified in the blog post - is that instead of stopping and asking for elevated permission it relentlessly tries to find a hack on it's own. (An equivalent situation for a human developer would be needing some access to a third-party sandbox, and instead of asking a senior for credentials, tries to setup his own sandbox from scratch)
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#556This 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 missing the point, simon is a fantastic developer. but to keep track of all the nuances of the frontend frameworks and browser implementation is a lot even for great people.
it is really awesome that the final change was only a two line css change.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Yeah there are some tasks which it is a definite speed-up but I think overall its probably only marginally beneficial. Which is why, ~6 months into 10x productivity we aren’t seeing ai boosters shipping 5 years worth of software.
It’s possible to produce 10x the lines of code.
But that’s not the same as producing 10x functionality that will be used or is wanted by users or customers.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
It sounds like you learned lots of things related to the tool, but not so much about the problem that you were using the tool to solve?
Is that fair? Not trying to snark? I see similar results myself
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#559Earlier 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/
The real point is not "one session", it's the fact that people now do that routinely, that CICD are using those to check every commit, and each search engine query now does that too, so it multiplies
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#560This 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…
[deleted]