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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#21

Post by SecretDreams »

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #10
paytonjjones wrote: post #2

Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS

[flagged]

I understand this perspective. I'll just note that as the abilities increase, the intent is to have some non -coding IC or TPM/manager literally just managing some LLMs and cutting out some software engineers. The goodness is specifically to wholly replace people who code first and foremost, at least partially. It just has to cost less tokens than the equivalent wage is the pricing goal.

And people who use LLMs to talk for them (e.g. email, slack) are deplorable. A completely disrespectful use case in my view.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#22

Post by threatripper »

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…

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.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#24

Post by skybrian »

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…

There are plenty of good sandboxes out there but somehow no "obvious right answer" that everyone knows to recommend. Seems like a missed opportunity.

(I'm happy with exe.dev, but I'm not sure what I'd use if I were coding on a Mac.)

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#25

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

It’s not just a more proactive and diligent opus. The capabilities are significantly higher on fable. It’s not a paradigm shift, but it’s close.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#26

Post by snide »

I've been working on a fairly complicated real-time app [0] for playing dungeons and dragons on a TV. It has to do a lot of complicated "Figma-like" things to keep the real-time nature and multi-editor possibilities in check. Oh, and the battlemap is a Three JS canvas with lots of effects and clipping going on.

I'm VERY impressed with Claude 5. I had long ago given up hope that my real-time systems would work without a lot of hacky time-windows and throttle checks. On a lark to try things out, I decided to try out the new model and talk in the output I wanted for a rewrite [1], not the solution. I just listed my problems and places I've had keeping track of my code. It went off and rewrote everything in a much more elegant solution where the state followed a very clear pipeline. It had to navigate YJS, Partykit, Svelte, Three JS, R2 hosting, and a Turso DB I was running in an embedded state for speed.

I watched it hit the wall a few times, and then sudden say... fuck it, i'm making something easier to reproduce over in /tmp to try and solve this (with a more minimal setup). I'm utterly bewildered with how well it did and how much better my app runs. The /usage would have cost me $230 bucks based on how many tokens it consumed if I wasn't already on a max plan. I'm going to miss not having it when the time-window runs out later this month, and will likely occasionally dip in for big projects and just pay my way out of some problems.

I'll also say I like it's MOOD much better now. It's a lot less congratulatory, and talks through it's reasoning in a much better way. Look, it's not a real coder, and I'm sure there is some flaws, but it took my crappy ideas and said... hey, i understand what you want to do, here's a way to do it better. Also, I removed 2x the amount of code that it added. Really impressive.

[0]: https://tableslayer.com

[1]: https://github.com/Siege-Perilous/tableslayer/pull/448

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#27

Post by Ucalegon »

senectus1 wrote: post #9
paytonjjones wrote: post #2

Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." I'm convinced this is going to be the summary of the 2020 decade...

This one of the places to manufacture the consent for that to take place, because we are commenting within an organization that has given the money to ensure it that what could be is done. Most people clapped and made money, who cares what happens next, making money is the only good that matters.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#28

Post by ghshephard »

andoando wrote: post #19
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 mean what's the big deal? I use --dangeorusly-skip-permissions on every single interaction in the last 6 months. Worst case it deletes my files that are all on git? It fucks up my local DB? Cool. I save way more time not babying it than the occasional fuck up I have to salvage.

Worst case it gets access to gmail. And Github. And the Internet. I'm increasingly appreciating the importance of a physical finger-press on Yubikey to trigger the FIDO2 + OIDC Auth. I don't think there is an easy way for it to hack a new session.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#30

Post by skybrian »

Terr_ wrote: post #15
bryanlarsen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also bemused by the number of people who think they've got an effective sandbox yet their sandboxed agent has access to all of their code, their github, and unrestricted web access.

I keep telling folks that they need to imagine LLMs (even "local" ones) as if you're farming it out to JS code running on some dude's browser somewhere: It can't keep a secret, and a determined person can make it emit anything they like. We need to be asking what the most devious and malicious output could be, and whether what we do with that output (e.g. arguments to command-line tools) would still be safe.

We do have ways to avoid giving an LLM any secrets, but it needs to be the simple, default solution.
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