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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#461

Post by user43928 »

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.

The answer to that question seems obvious: No, it is not safe.

Yet with tens of millions of developers using these tools, there have not been widespread incidents of this sort as far as I know.

So it leaves me with a few choices:

- manually review and approve each command: obviously not realistic, you would just click Approve

- use a sandbox and hope the exploit is not devious enough to escape the sandbox when you run or open the project outside of the sandbox

- use AI without web access and limit other external dependencies

- don't use agentic AI

- use Claude or Codex auto approval classifier and hope for the best

Personally, I'm going with the last option for now.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#462

Post by Terretta »

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…

The new benchmark for LLMs is how much of simonw's new know-how is required.

Lower bars are better.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#463

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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…

Are you using Claude Code or a different agent? I'm curious how screenshots are being fed back into the model? Does CC register a tool for this, or is Fable just using a bash tool to perform the screen capture, and then what tool is it using to request the resulting image to be fed back to it?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#464

Post by nullbio »

lionkor wrote: post #454

When prompted like this: > What could be the reason for a horizontal scrollbar appearing inside a ? Come up with a single likely fix path. Keep it terse. ChatGPT instantly responded with some speculation and then the same exact fix, with zero access to the code or a browser or anything. It also included ways to fix it by removing code, saying: > Likely cause: the textarea is rendering long unbroken text while horizon…

Still don't know why people use Claude. Maybe because they don't know what they're doing.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#465

Post by elicash »

galoisscobi wrote: post #121

Let's boil the ocean for a 2 line fix and call it frontier intelligence.

I tried using this calculator: https://www.andymasley.com/visuals/ai-prompt-footprint/

It doesn't have Claude Fable yet, so I went with GPT 5.5 Pro. And so I'd estimate it at 22 gallons of water used (different from consumed, of course). That's quite a lot! It amazes me how much the different use cases and models use dramatically different amounts of water. My takeaway from playing with that calculator has been the folks who talk about water usage are overstating the impact of chatbots, but not overstating when it comes to vibecoding.

The good thing is that competition should drive down how efficient these models are in the long run. This blog post makes me not want to run Fable because of the cost, and that incidentally also means selecting models that aren't as wasteful in terms of water and electricity.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#466

Post by nullbio »

Exactly why I hate using Claude. Furthermore, if you tell it not to do this over-exploration and automation in your CLAUDE.md, it will ignore it. Meanwhile ChatGPT religiously follows every instruction, and will trace its behavior back to a particular instruction if asked.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#467

Post by mapt »

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…

It was only pursuing the goal you gave it - Keep Summer Safe.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#468

Post by smartbit »

discordance wrote: post #353
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.

I see it as a prioritization exercise. I know the above is a trivial example, but more generally, does the guy who wrote Datasette and Django want to wrangle front end and css, or do they want to work on something else?

See above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498573#48502311

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#470

Post by nullbio »

EugeneG wrote: post #450

This is where Codex 5.5 just feels practically better. It’s fast, thoughtful and just works. It feels like a pleasure compared to Opus/Fable’s endless explorations.

It also uses 1/4th to 1/10th the amount of tokens. If I want all that extra garbage I'll tell Codex to do it or build a pipeline with Codex. Otherwise, don't. Codex gives you control, Claude just does whatever it wants and ignores you, and then tells you it's finished the task when it's only finished a quarter of the tasks you gave it and hallucinates the rest.
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