Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

Post by simonw » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

wasabi991011 wrote: post #607

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…

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.

Post by simonw » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

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

Post by eddyzh » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #539

solenoid0937 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't for me. I use Fable to make plans, then give them to GPT 5.5 to review, and it always finds flaws and edge cases that Fable misses (some are really critical). It was the same with Opus 4.8. I'll admit it finds a bit fewer issues now, but Fable feels more like an incremental improvement than a major generation ahead.

Post by redsocksfan45 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

risyachka wrote: post #379

jmmcd wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are missing that Willison is among the very best people we have in the role of (for lack of a good name): early access to frontier models, evaluate them in real scenarios, no wishful thinking, hype, or doom, communicate the possibilities. Yes he could have fixed this himself but then he would have learned nothing about the AI, and we wouldn't have read a fascinating and important article.

>> 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.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

piker wrote: post #342

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…

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.