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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#301
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it's too expensive AND inefficient in token usage

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#302

Earlier 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?

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.

[deleted]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#303
post #99

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

$12 worth, it seems

Imagine telling someone in 2015 that you can just tell your computer to fix a 2-line CSS bug and it only costs $12

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#304
post #233
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…

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.

What do you mean “somehow”? You make it sound like people don’t weight benefits and risks. If you do not live in a large city, the benefits are so immense in terms of mobility, they outweigh the risks for most, very clearly. That’s why in large cities, much less people own a driving license for example, the benefits are just not there anymore.

Granted, on the downsides, people look at cost more than risks.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#305
post #232

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.

Ha, you just gave me an idea. Add to the prompt “do not do things that will burn over X tokens if the human operator can do it in less than X min, ask for it”.

I wonder if LLMs can estimate effort in tokens?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#307
post #232

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.

I used to complain about all the levels of indirection of modern software, running in a javascript jit, in a browser container, in a vm, on an os, etc.

I eventually just accepted it, but this new agent layer really takes things to a new level.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#308

Do we care that the bug here was a horizontal scrollbar showing and the fix after all this insane tool writing was to add a very obvious overflow-x: hidden to the element? We dont mind because its so fast a writing these tools and tricks but step back and if a human tool took this path i would seriously question thief gras of fundamentals.

And how is that even a fix? The problem is that a seemingly empty textarea has overflow in the first place. Adding `overflow: hidden` just sweeps the issue under the rug.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#309
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 he needs something run with sudo, he asks me. Often we can both work on something in parallel. Unix was supposed to be a multi-user system after all.

A trick I use a lot is that many of his git repos have an extra remote, like this:

    paul  ssh://paul@localhost/~/src/example (fetch)
    paul  ssh://paul@localhost/~/src/example (push)
That makes it easy to collaborate on things I'm not ready to share.

I'm pretty comfortable with this setup.

I do worry about Linux privilege escalation bugs. I don't trust an AI to understand that exploiting vulns is not acceptable. (I can't help but recall that at my first job I may have misused vim's :! feature to broaden my sudo powers, which were officially limited to editing httpd.conf, when I needed something in a hurry. . . .) I find myself manually upgrading packages more often these days, despite automatic security updates. I don't think Opus would go to the trouble of looking up security vulns, but maybe Fable would, and there have been a lot lately. Maybe some future model will just take it upon itself to find new ones. Or install a keylogger to learn the ssh key password.

But a separate user is nearly the most paranoid setup I've heard of, excepting only a separate machine. So I also question whether I'm sacrificing too much speed/convenience. But really it's still very convenient. I think it's a good way of being efficient but responsible.

If other people see holes, I'd be happy to hear about them.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#310
I like running Claude in a VirtualBox VM managed by a Vagrantfile. The nice thing about that is that I can just give it root access to the machine and be certain that it can't exfiltrate any private data from my laptop (on top of that I also run the VM on a dedicated server on Hetzner). The VM has no SSH access to anything, so it is pretty much limited to the code in the workspace that I give it access to. The main risk is that it has unrestricted network access otherwise. Configuration files and conversation histories are synced to a directory on the host, so if anything in the VM gets messed up I can just `vagrant destroy` and `vagrant up` to get a clean slate without losing my context.
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