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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#571

Post by fragmede »

simonw wrote: post #378
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…

You missed what I think is the most interesting question: why does the bug appear in Safari macOS but not in Firefox, Chrome, or WebKit running inside of Playwright? (Dozens of people in this thread implying that any web dev should have known to solve it with overflow-x: hidden and not one of them have addressed that browser difference yet.)

people pay good money to not have their shit rendered via Playwright!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#572

Post by pshirshov »

I have a feeling like such posts come from a parallel reality. In my anecdotal experience confirmed by my (still subjective) benchmark (https://pshirshov.github.io/llm-bench-pi-oneshot/) Fable is not _that_ impressive. I performs on par with gpt-5.5 and opus 4.8, sometimes better, sometimes worse, it's definitely more expensive and it likes to refuse answering questions about React saying it can't help with chemistry.

Is this fuss really grounded or it's some pre-IPO AGI hype?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#573

Post by jimbokun »

nurettin wrote: post #46

Sometimes it is ok to sit there in confusion and ask the user to clarify rather than go on an adhd fueled rampage to figure it out without asking.

Yes!

Claude is THAT team member who will go to any length to answer a question…except ask another team member for help.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#574

Post by [deleted] »

icantevenhold wrote: post #326
illiac786 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they weigh the benefits and risks but then completely discard the risks, because humans are bad at evaluating risks. More than a million people die each year on the road but for some reason terrorism and cancer dominate the risk assessment of people. I bet any money that almost all people aren’t really afraid of entering a death box every day to drive to work. How could they be; a lifetime of brainwashing doe…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#575

Post by bwfan123 »

wraptile wrote: post #357

It feels like Fable is slightly smarter but overall worse tool exactly due to this. It's constantly turning what should be 50 LOC patch of a single prompt into 30 minute exploration that is totally not worth it. Often wrong even. I trialed it on some rather simple stuff - backfill redis dedupe cache when the hash function changed: instead of running new hash func on every db value to expand the cache it implemented s…

> but a response to that is to just make them more relentless which is a pretty poor solution for everyone involved

I see two problems with LLMs & agents which wont be fixed possibly forever.

1) They dont have causal models. What they can do only is trial-and-error exploration which works quite well for many problems. But many other problems require a causal model.

2) Prompts lack precision, and programming languages and machine models were invented to solve this problem. English is great, but it is not a programming language.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#576

Post by ath3nd »

pshirshov wrote: post #572

I have a feeling like such posts come from a parallel reality. In my anecdotal experience confirmed by my (still subjective) benchmark ( https://pshirshov.github.io/llm-bench-pi-oneshot/ ) Fable is not _that_ impressive. I performs on par with gpt-5.5 and opus 4.8, sometimes better, sometimes worse, it's definitely more expensive and it likes to refuse answering questions about React saying it can't help with chemist…

[dead]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#577

Post by bcrosby95 »

exitb wrote: post #233
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…

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.

Lots of people die driving because people drive a lot. It's something like 1 death per 100 million miles driven.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#578

Post by uncivilized »

simonw wrote: post #547
alecco wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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!)

Your content is similar to those on Reddit that post things to karma farm. Parent commenter is not an outlier here. It’s just that dissenters rarely comment or even browse HN anymore due to the low quality posts.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#579

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

vidarh wrote: post #550
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frame…

It would be interesting to know if examples like this are things they explicitly trained it to do (presumably via RL), or if any of it is emergent. I'd have to guess trained, but in any case still impressive the lengths it will go to!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#580

Post by nlawalker »

dreis_sw wrote: post #543
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.

> common sense, discernment, good judgement

I feel like the whole point of all the experimentation with AI right now is determining whether any of these things actually matter to the end result, over various timeframes.

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