This post is an extremely good example of how unsuitable agents are for a lot of tasks. Doing all that for a CSS fix is insanity.
It also makes you wonder if Anthropic is actively making their models eat tokens by favoring complexity.
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
271–280 of 748 posts
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lines of code for a bugfix is a really bad proxy for effort required. You should estimate how much time it would have taken a human
I looked at the screenshot and for the rest of the article wondered if it would be as simple as `overflow-x: hidden`. And to my surprise it was. This would’ve take a frontend dev 10 seconds to deduce and another 10 seconds to confirm.
The thing that puzzles me is that I would expect overflow-x: hidden to result in text typed into that textarea being wider than the page and being invisibly truncated on the right hand side.
But that's not what happens. And in fact, when you start typing in the textarea the horizontal scrollbar vanishes - it's only there when the textarea is empty.
Am I misunderstanding anything here? Seems like it's some weird Safari bug, since Firefox and Chrome don't have the problem.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#273This is simultaneously amazing and horrifying. I feel like we’re at the stage where if AI decides it needs to delete your production DB to solve the user login problem, then it’ll find a way to do just that.
We're approaching the "Sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" stage.
I feel like we might already be there...
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#274Earlier 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.
Yes, but we usually use cars as a means to an end. Have you ever met a manager who setup gasmaxxing policies and criticized employees for doing their job instead of driving?
I know sales people in pharma who spend all day driving, not only for sales visits but also drive doctors for their personal errands, and all this driving is encouraged by management.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#275Isn't that something you just open a devtools for and have fixed in like 2 minutes? For me, it got frustrated debugging on a real LPDDR4 controller/phy and having me in the loop slowing it down, so it wrote an HW emulator to be able to run the original LPDDR4 training aarch64 binary from the manufacturer, to see what register writes it was making and to compare with the opensource rewrite it was implementing. Mildly…
$12 in tokens and the OP wasn't even at the computer. OP was working on a personal matter, arguably way more valuable than fixing a CSS scrollbar.
Here's what the $12 payed for: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72...
Such a fix would have only required basic CSS knowledge and taken max 5 minutes with the HTML inspector. Paying $12 to save 5 minutes ($144/hour) is a decision that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable making.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
$12 in tokens and the OP wasn't even at the computer. OP was working on a personal matter, arguably way more valuable than fixing a CSS scrollbar.
Here's what the $12 payed for: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72... Such a fix would have only required basic CSS knowledge and taken max 5 minutes with the HTML inspector. Paying $12 to save 5 minutes ($144/hour) is a decision that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable making.
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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#277Fable 5 is relentlessly underwhelming.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but we usually use cars as a means to an end. Have you ever met a manager who setup gasmaxxing policies and criticized employees for doing their job instead of driving?
Having played with Fable a bit, if it doesn’t kill tokenmaxxing I don’t know what will.
I'm interested in what you mean, if you could develop. Would it kill tokenmaxxing because it's so bad? Because it's incredibly efficient? Because it's way too expensive?
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#279> 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…
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.
In case of driving the stakes are equally high for everyone on the road. Can we say the same for an agent?
Having an agent is like forever having a genius intern who'll almost always do the perfect job for you. But there is non-zero chance that they'll also come up with quirky solutions and execute those with confidence and no follow-ups. You don't grant the intern production access and hope they check with you.
I don't think the corporate equivalent of "dog ate my homework" flies, if the dog ate your files and your production DB if you are unlucky.
Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
#280> 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…
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 but to use cars now. We bought their products because they forced them down our throats. There is nowhere near that kind of pressure behind the adoption of... oh dear lord.
[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2022/06/how-lobbyis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...