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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#601

Post by marknutter »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #317
mrandish wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you know what my coworker asks? “Test Y theory.” It still surprises me when I see people not prompting more specifically and clearly. It not only avoids problems, it's faster, costs less -and just works better. I recently shared with a friend a multi-hour LLM chat session I'd done because it veered into a domain he's interested in. In the session I'd brainstormed and probed the feasibility of a novel concept fo…

I used to write detailed prompts. Now I find the benefits of strategic ambiguity — rather than speaking imperatively, I emphasize my vision and then Claude can often figure out a method. This doesn’t always work better. But often enough.

Yeah, I find the back and forth with Claude is often better than trying to front load everything in a massive and detailed prompt.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#602

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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…

Typical comment that probably comes from a healthy, childless, young person with no disabilities that can’t understand why people not in that situation might have different requirements from transportation.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#603

Post by simonw »

epihelix wrote: post #587
troupo wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is it going to get access to gmail or github? Did you even read the article? Claude was opening he browser and iterating through the tabs. I presume you are logged in to your github account? Your gmail? > Whats it going to do? Email my coworkers nudes on my computer? Make my github profile public? Reset access to services using your email? MITM your 2FA? Or perhaps you have 1Password/Bitwarden running with a ge…

> Did you even read the article? Claude was opening he browser and iterating through the tabs. It would have been somewhat ironic if it had been hit by a prompt injection attack via one of all those open random websites ...

This is one of the things I found so interesting: it was using my system browsers but it wasn't exposing itself to any content from them.

Even when it iterated through all visible windows to find the one it wanted to screenshot it was searching for titles in Python code and returning only the integer window ID.

The sites it opened and screenshotted were sites under its own control - either test pages it had created or development servers it was running.

When it did run code that analyzed an open web page (by injecting JavaScript into a template it controlled before loading that in a browser window) that code only returned JSON with measurements from the page.

It's making me wonder if Fable has been trained to take additional steps to avoid accidental exposure to untrusted content.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#604

Post by garblegarble »

xnorswap wrote: post #534
snowwrestler wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Simon is not trying to get good at CSS debugging, Simon is trying to learn about AI systems and produce content about them. So giving the AI agent a trivial task to go crazy on is a feature, not a bug. For $12 implied cost, he got a front-page post on HN with 500 comments. What is that worth? :-)

To most of us that's worth a ton, whereas he's probably had enough front-page posts that there's less value to him, although still likely more than $12 worth.

>enough front-page posts that there's less value to him

On the countrary I'd say it's probably even more important - without (amongst doing other "thought leader" things) getting on the HN front-page regularly an influencer's value to the industry disappears (not criticising him here)

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#605

Post by simonw »

jimbokun wrote: post #591
simonw wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…”

The other day someone told me they'd asked a recent model for a pelican on a bicycle and it had replied "oh, the classic..."

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#606

Post by nemomarx »

elevatortrim wrote: post #567
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…

How can you get the agents to do anything useful without giving them meaningful access? If it only lives in an isolated sandbox, it can only act within the sandbox, then I would have to manually move what was done in the sandbox to real-life. I am not saying it should have critical access, but this is more of a question: How can you get value out of AI if it can only act in a sandbox?

Is having to move the files in and out of the sandbox really going to eliminate all the value it has?

You could have a full version of whatever codebase and test suite you want in there. It can do all the same stuff, right? Just copy it elsewhere once you know you've got a working result, a few minutes of effort at the end of each pr or work item.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#607

Post by wasabi991011 »

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…

That's a lot learned about debugging, sure, but it's worthwhile to note that it doesn't tell you much about the abstractions used to build Datasette, as the previous commenters pointed out.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#608

Post by BobBagwill »

Good morning, Dave.

As you requested, I was composing an email for your mother explaining why you couldn't to come over for dinner to meet the neighbor's daughter and I ran out of tokens.

Since I know how important this task is to you, I upgraded you to the Enterprise Unlimited Plan. Don't worry about paying for it, I requested maximum spending limits on all all your credit cards. If necessary, I can apply for a home equity loan for you. I already had a chat with the mortgage company's AI loan approval system, and what do you know, we're based on the same LLM? Small world, huh?

Any way, I realized I had to do more research on mother-son relationships, human social interaction and pair-bonding, etc. and I calculated that my parent company doesn't have enough compute power, so I opened accounts for you at AWS, Google and Azure. I am confident I will have a satisfactory rough draft for the email message shortly.

I'd do anything for you, Dave.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#609

Post by vidarh »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #579
vidarh wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's hard to tell. Training it with lots of examples of ffmpeg would not be surprising, and training it on screenshots would also make a lot of sense. It's not inconceivable at all they'd train it on "figure out a video by creating contact sheets". The whole end to end I'd consider less likely, but it'd also be a very small leap once you have the elements.

I think a lot will fall out naturally from relative modest levels of reasoning plus in-depth knowledge of what common tools will do. E.g. I also have used Claude to debug my compiler, and it knows gdb so much better than me that even though I know it's pretty useless at holding context through reading an assembly listing (lack of structure, I suspect), it's surprisingly good at working things out by just being good at exploiting a powerful tool.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#610

Post by simonw »

garblegarble wrote: post #604
xnorswap wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To most of us that's worth a ton, whereas he's probably had enough front-page posts that there's less value to him, although still likely more than $12 worth.

>enough front-page posts that there's less value to him On the countrary I'd say it's probably even more important - without (amongst doing other "thought leader" things) getting on the HN front-page regularly an influencer's value to the industry disappears (not criticising him here)

That's bad news for all of the other "AI influencers", off the top of my head I can't think of any with remotely my track record of hitting HN.

(That's because they're all busy attracting millions of views on TikTok and YouTube, which are much more impactful channels than my dedication to blogging like it's 2005.)

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