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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#391

Post by andai »

azraellzanella wrote: post #382
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…

If you want to run Claude in a container: https://github.com/dvdstelt/ai-agents

Alternatively you can just give it its own user. I do that, so it can blow up its own files, but not mine.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#392

Post by backwardsponcho »

dumbdumb125 wrote: post #190
sipjca wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

im more surprised that more people don’t treat their computer as disposable anyway. that it could just be wiped at any moment and it wouldn’t matter. shit happens, could be stolen, broken, whatever. the computer should be able to be thrown out the window and continue to live life. to be clear, i don’t think upgrading and disposable in this way is good, but it being wiped at any moment shouldn’t be a concern i grew up…

i think it's about drawing a line between your "personal computer" and a software development machine. any digital-native is going to accumulate programs, configurations, and other bits and pieces that aren't trivial to migrate to a new machine.

Programs, configs and "other bits" are the trivial parts that no one should care about. It takes about 5min to go from fresh install to near-fully-configured.

Even the hardware itself doesn't matter that much, in the end it's all provided by your employer.

Leaking session tokens or secrets, on the other hand...

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#393

Post by simonw »

piker wrote: post #342
bananaquant wrote: post #338

This 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 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.kCGWindowListOptionOnScreenOnly, Quartz.kCGNullWindowID)" using the pyobjc-framework-Quartz library, which installs cleanly via "uv run".

- A neat trick for simulating keyboard shortcuts is to run document.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent("keydown", {key: "/", bubbles: true})); after the page loads.

- You don't need Flask or Starlette to run a CORS-enabled localhost server for capturing JSON from another window - 19 lines of code against the Python standard library http.server package works just fine.

- getComputedStyle(document.querySelector("navigation-search").shadowRoot.querySelector("textarea")) works to read dimensions from inside a Web Component's shadow DOM.

- defaults write com.google.chrome.for.testing AppleShowScrollBars Always

- Claude Fable knows how to apply all of the above. It's always interesting to pick up hints of what a model can and cannot do.

I'm always confused at how many people equate using a coding agent to solve a problem with "learning nothing". If you pay attention to what it's doing you can learn so much!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#394

Post by andai »

dyauspitr wrote: post #25
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.

They should have made it three times bigger instead of two.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#395

Post by simonw »

risyachka wrote: post #379
jmmcd wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are missing that Willison is among the very best people we have in the role of (for lack of a good name): early access to frontier models, evaluate them in real scenarios, no wishful thinking, hype, or doom, communicate the possibilities. Yes he could have fixed this himself but then he would have learned nothing about the AI, and we wouldn't have read a fascinating and important article.

>> 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. There's always room for improving every one of those.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#396

Post by user43928 »

beernet wrote: post #371
oulipo2 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

While one can raise environmental concerns about the AI datacenter buildout, I don't think it is fair to say that it "ruins the planet".

I don't think it is a good contribution to the discussion around Simon's LLM use to fix a CSS bug.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#397

Post by piokoch »

"When I came back a few minutes later I saw my machine open a browser window in my regular Firefox and then navigate to the dialog in question. I had not told Claude Code to use any browser automation".

Yup, tokens are eaten, money are paid. I am wondering how much energy/money is being burnt everyday by all of those LLM Agents on some useless activities like trying to recreate web application just to fix CSS bug.

And I would not call it proactive, proactive would be to ask for a CSS + HTML file in question, not trying to recreate them from screenshots.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#398

Post by skerit »

conradkay wrote: post #69
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…

Does low/medium effort fix it for you? Seems like Fable 5 low can outperform Opus 4.8 high/xhigh often, and uses a lot fewer tokens

Fable 5 on medium is amazing. It's handling everything I throw at it

I had _one_ instance where for some obscure reason it decided to fall back to Opus 4.8 and Opus IMMEDIATELY fucked it up and implemented a super obvious feature in a slightly-wrong way.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#399

Post by simonw »

oulipo2 wrote: post #366
piker wrote: post #342

Earlier 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.

[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/
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