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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#541

Post by alecco »

simonw wrote: post #533
alecco wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low effort content. You keep mention your product from the start over and over. There's not much useful information in the anecdotal post. It could've been a one-liner tweet. Good corporate tech blogs at least give something useful or insightful for the reader and only after that they dare plug their product/service near the end.

Hot damn, if I'm communicating less value than corporate tech blogs there really is no hope for me. ("You keep mention your product from the start over and over" - I don't think that's fair, I mention Datasette Agent once at the start to set the scene but I spend more time talking about AgentsView than my own projects in the bulk of the piece.)

[flagged]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#542

Post by peterbell_nyc »

piker wrote: post #426
simonw wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry that wasn't a criticism of you! I completely see how it was misread that way. I would edit it now if I could. I was using you more as an example of a hypothetical programmer using it in this way. If the goal is to create a maintainable product, this isn't a great approach. If the goal is to learn about the model and its behaviors itself, of course this is a fantastic way to experiment. Yes, you might have learn…

Honestly my goal is to learn how to teach an agent to build a maintainable product, so I'm way more interested in the learnings at the agentic level (how to prompt/direct/manage context/restrict tool use, provide reusable shims, etc) than getting into the details of a css bug. That's just not a level of abstraction with sufficient leverage for what I'm trying to do.

I stopped coding a while back because I could have more impact directing a team of developers than writing code personally.

For my use case, the agents are now how I can have that scaled impact.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#543

Post by dreis_sw »

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…

Seems like this model delivers on what has already been scaling quite nicely, which is the length and complexity of the requested tasks, but isn't such a big improvement on what hasn't been scaling so far - common sense, discernment, good judgement.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#544

Post by simonw »

rco8786 wrote: post #540
simonw wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you pay attention to what it's doing you can learn so much! I think your post is fair but it's worth pointing out that learning via watching is much less effective than learning via doing.

I used to believe that was universally true, but then I learned about the "worked-example effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#545

Post by dreis_sw »

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…

I think the new high effort settings are so strong that selecting them when the task doesn't require it actually impacts the output negatively.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#546

Post by azuanrb »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #484
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #482

> 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, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t possible for it to trigger mouse movements or keyboard shortcuts within a window, so how was it doing that? I continue to feel validated in my refusal to use terminal-based LLMs on my l…

I'm shocked they don't come with a way to run them in a sandbox. Shouldn't this be relatively easy for a $1T company to set up? Isn't this trivial compared to the entire harness?

[flagged]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#547

Post by simonw »

alecco wrote: post #541
simonw wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot damn, if I'm communicating less value than corporate tech blogs there really is no hope for me. ("You keep mention your product from the start over and over" - I don't think that's fair, I mention Datasette Agent once at the start to set the scene but I spend more time talking about AgentsView than my own projects in the bulk of the piece.)

[flagged]

A lot of people find real value in my posts. You're an outlier here.

I care a lot about not wasting people's time. I never want to post anything where a substantial portion of readers come away regretting having spent their time reading it.

(OK there's an exception in that I delight in posting photos of birds on my blog, but I figure those are pretty quick for people to skip over if they don't like photos of birds!)

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#548

Post by danudey »

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…

The whole saga is kind of nuts, but the thing that fascinates me most is that Fable got this far and then hit some kind of guardrail; I'd be very curious to know what it wasn't able to do that caused it to downgrade to Opus.

It already got extremely... invasive? It didn't do anything that I wouldn't have approved in the same case, but it's interesting that it got as far as launching browsers, inspecting every open window, and storing screenshots to disk, and then it was stopped by something? I wonder what.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#549

Post by ModernMech »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #459
saberience wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I don't know what problems you're working on but Fable is not just better, it is a step change from GPT 5.5 in my experience. It feels at least one major model generation ahead.

One Hacker News commenter says it's worse, another retorts it's a step change and even includes emphasis! Will the first commentor retort back that it's been a double dog step change in the opposite direction? Can't wait to see how this comment thread unfolds!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#550

Post by vidarh »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #463
simonw wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Claude Code can process images by reading the files. And as I found out the other day, it also knows ffmpeg well enough to process videos even though it has no native video capabilities...

While debugging, it asked me to pass it a video from the past testing, proceeded to generate a "contact sheet" of the video using ffmpeg, interpreted the image to figure out which frames it needed, and extracted the full size frames and extracted the relevant text from it and used it to reproduce the problem with Playwright...

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