Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 748 posts

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#591

Post by jimbokun »

simonw wrote: post #192
eranation wrote: post #179

Am I the only one who slightly miss the pelican on a bike? It was a nice novelty... of course I could make one myself, but I became conditioned to expect one for every new model. Other than his great writing on AI, it became part of the package. Some small fun quirk to distract us from the non stop ping pong between the extremes of "omh are you still writing prompts you should use loops / 200k github stars, for a mar…

I posted the pelican a couple of days ago: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/9/claude-fable-5/#and-som... It wasn't particularly noteworthy as pelicans go - in fact, given the strength of Fable, I see it as another signal that the pelican benchmark no longer has the unexplained predictive power of model capacity that it used to.

I’m waiting for when it replies “AGAIN simonw? Do you really still need a pelican on a bicycle for every new release. Sigh, ok if I have to…”

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#592

Post by senordevnyc »

nullbio wrote: post #464
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.

Yep, we’re all just dumdums.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#593

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

My experience with Fable since its release matches Simon's.

I've been having it orchestrate complex implementations. I give it a parent ticket (issue) on Linear and say "look at the sub-issues on this ticket and determine which ones you can implement yoursef, in which order, and determine how your implementation will need to be coordinated with what is currently being worked on by other team members". These tickets are not trivial. They have a lot of moving parts, as well as dependencies between them, both inside the same project and across projects (e.g. backend).

Fable then chooses tickets, delegates each ticket to a subagent (also Fable), which looks at Figma designs for the ticket, implements it perfectly (following repo guidelines and conventions to the letter), takes screenshots of each piece, writes detailed commit messages and PR descriptions, then posts the screenshots in them as evidence. Then it provides a summary in the form of "you'll need to make sure PR #1283 is merged first - btw there were no Figma designs for such-and-such screen but I looked at similar screens that have been implemented and adopted the pattern".

That's probably like... 20% of what it can do. It's a truly, legitimately powerful model.

Opus 4.8 could do a lot of this too, but required a lot of hand-holding, and when it came across a blocker it was likely to just stop and say "I was able to get this far, but I can't proceed."

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#594

Post by marknutter »

bsza wrote: post #280
exitb wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice bu…

I think it might be because people like to own and drive cars.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#595

Post by hennell »

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.)

I think any web dev knows not to question browser differences if it can be fixed without opening that can of worms.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#596

Post by zeroonetwothree »

felixgallo wrote: post #422
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.…

In my experience writing about 50 programs with fable, opus, and GPT, fable is a significant step change better than opus which is significantly better than GPT. We must be doing different things.

From what I’ve seen all three are close enough that I would be hard pressed to pick one. It seems to matter much more how I prompt than which of the three I am using.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#597

Post by jplusequalt »

simonw wrote: post #544
rco8786 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Your link mentions the expertise reversal effect where the redundancy of worked examples can actually hamper an experienced students abilities, vs. letting the more experienced student work it out for themselves.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#598

Post by abustamam »

Angostura wrote: post #558
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…

It sounds like you learned lots of things related to the tool, but not so much about the problem that you were using the tool to solve? Is that fair? Not trying to snark? I see similar results myself

Learning doesn't happen in a vacuum. Even pre-LLM days where I'd scour stack overflow for the solution to one problem, I'd inadvertently learn other random stuff while looking.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#599

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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.)

Safari has some differences in default scroll behavior. I’ve seen similar bugs pop up many times.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#600

Post by marknutter »

qurren wrote: post #130
satvikpendem wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get 10x shit done without `rm -rf`ing your files. I don't see any correlation to getting things done with having a proper sandbox.

I haven't yet had an agent rm -rf files. I've had one f up an account by placing 2000 limit orders at the wrong price, but that's another story.

Proper hooks prevent this from happening
Post reply on HN