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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#401

Post by skerit »

simonw wrote: post #107
yen223 wrote: post #44

I could have sworn Claude Code could already do this before Fable. Things get really magical when it starts working with adb to screenshot and debug Android apps

Claude Code could absolutely run Playwright and take screenshots, but I've never seen it wire together an ad-hoc "uv run --with pyobjc-framework-Quartz" plus "screencapture -l $windowID" mechanism to take a screenshot in a different browser when the Playwright setup failed to replicate the expected error.

I've seen Opus do some incredibly token-costly things before too. In fact after most sessions I ask it about which tools it used often, which tools could be simplified/made less verbose, could be "combined" into one, ... So for each project I mostly create a few little scripts that do a bunch of things in one go that it would normally do in multiple tool calls.

For example: one thing Opus was really bad at was re-running the test suite followed by a bunch of `| grep` suffixes. So it would often re-run 5+ minute test suites just to grep the output a bit differently

The solution was to wire up a little script that ran the test suite, save the output to a file, and then inform it where that file is and to NOT re-run the suite just so it can grep the output differently. This saved me a bunch of time & tokens.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#402

Post by simonw »

tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #348

How can a LLM be assigned an emotion as being "proactive". This is highly misleading to anyone that scans just the headlines. What actually happened is that the user started a prompt, and Claude took $12 worth of tokens to resolve the issue. How it did so was basically looping until it got to the answer How is this proactive? It's literally being token greedy and maximising revenue for the LLM owner. People really ne…

I was trying to capture the idea that Claude Fable will act a whole lot more aggressively in pursuit of the goals that you set it than other models I've worked with.

The case I described is a good example of this. I told it to fix a scroll bar, and it built test HTML pages and a throwaway Python server and tried several ways of testing in a browser before settling on a weird Frankenstein mechanism because it identified that Playwright WebKit wasn't suffering from the bug but macOS Safari was.

... and it spent $12 of tokens to get there.

I think "proactive" is a good and relatively non-anthropomorphic term for this. I also considered "plucky" and "keen", which I think are more emotional words than "proactive".

> People really need to be putting on business hats at this stage, because we are being lead to believe that "more tokens = better".

I didn't intend my post to imply that spending $12 of tokens to fix a two lines CSS bug was "better".

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#403

Post by saberience »

simonw wrote: post #393
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.

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…

And Fable is still worse than Codex.

I use both and the only thing (as always) that I will use Claude for is UI design.

Opus 4.8 and now Fable are still both worse at actually getting the job done than the Codex model. Claude models write FAR too much code when it's not needed, they burn far too many tokens, when they are not needed, write un-necessary tests, write plans which are 5 pages longer than are needed, etc. etc.

Have you actually compared code quality and plan quality versus Codex? It's demonstrably worse.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#404

Post by ViscountPenguin »

simonw wrote: post #395
risyachka wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Eh, I've have the exact opposite experience.

Way back before instruct models it was pretty difficult, but for the last couple of years I haven't needed anything more complex than the type of text that I might send in a detailed email to a colleague.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#405

Post by chriswarbo »

Chu4eeno wrote: post #386
masklinn wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force. Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA. NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pij…

Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist? I'm not sure I'd take him as some neutral authority on the history of cars and driving in Europe.

> Isn't Not Just Bikes some US expat/biking maximalist?

According to their videos, they prefer trams within cities; generally take trains between cities; and acknowledge that cars are very useful for places which aren't so well connected (e.g. places that are far apart which aren't on a train line). They think encouraging the use of cars within cities is a bad idea (dangerous, scales poorly, makes those areas less pleasant to be, etc.).

Not what I'd think of as a "biking maximalist".

They do show themselves cycling to places that are nearby. Does that make Youtubers who record videos in their car "driving maximalists"?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#406

Post by simonw »

rsecure wrote: post #351

The prompt and information given are extremely generic, "here solve this problem - screenshot" - conclusion Fable is relentless? It used the tools at its disposal to solve the problem you gave it. "Claude was running in a folder that contained the source code for the application." Well you ran it there didn't you? "extreme lengths to get the information that it needed" No, those aren't extreme lengths - you gave it a…

[dead]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#407

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

BosunoB wrote: post #228

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…

> I watched the whole thing thinking it could've just asked me

You can tell it just that. Happened to me too but after instructing it to leave the review to me Fable was useful for hours of frontend iterations without significant token usage.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#408

Post by saberience »

simonw wrote: post #402
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #348

How can a LLM be assigned an emotion as being "proactive". This is highly misleading to anyone that scans just the headlines. What actually happened is that the user started a prompt, and Claude took $12 worth of tokens to resolve the issue. How it did so was basically looping until it got to the answer How is this proactive? It's literally being token greedy and maximising revenue for the LLM owner. People really ne…

I was trying to capture the idea that Claude Fable will act a whole lot more aggressively in pursuit of the goals that you set it than other models I've worked with. The case I described is a good example of this. I told it to fix a scroll bar, and it built test HTML pages and a throwaway Python server and tried several ways of testing in a browser before settling on a weird Frankenstein mechanism because it identifi…

It's not being aggressive, it's just trying throwing shit at problems until it sticks... or doesn't.

That doesn't make it smart or aggressive, if anything it's just been turned to crank tokens until something happens, which doesn't make it a good model.

Why are you positively anthropomorphizing this? It's an LLM, it's been tuned via RL, and it's been tuned by engineers at Anthropic to use a metric fuck-load of sub-agents and tokens to presumably pump their pre-IPO revenue!

A co-worker managed to get Fable to spin up 50 (!!!) sub-agents for a problem which codex worked on with 3 sub-agents. What the hell is going on here? It certainly doesn't mean Fable is "smarter" than Codex.

I've tested it extensively and I'm still using GPT 5.5 High Fast as my primary engineering model. It's far more steerable, writes less, higher quality code, and consistently finds issues and edge cases which are not found by Fable or Opus 4.7.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#409

Post by Dumblydorr »

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.

There’s zero value? Surely you don’t believe zero, it’s potentially the most powerful predictive AI in the world ever made? Maybe only incremental steps sure. But also their IPO is coming, you don’t want people evaluating them beforehand?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#410

Post by simonw »

realusername wrote: post #377
simonw wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I called it fascinating and used it as an example of Fable being "relentlessly proactive".

Maybe it's a difference of perspective, to me it's a model failure and certainly not proactive.

I also see this as a model failure. In this particular example the proactivity was a negative trait!
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