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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#621

Post by RealityVoid »

nlawalker wrote: post #580
dreis_sw wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They matter.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#622

Post by simonw »

garblegarble wrote: post #616
simonw wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

That's what I meant by other thought leadership things - that's all covering different niches. For what it's worth, I think you do useful work and are a respectible influencer. I'd also say don't be down about your use of blogging - I'd say it makes you more valuable, there aren't that many decision-makers who are going to sit through a bunch of breathless YouTube videos... P.S. I hope you don't object to me using th…

Hah, yeah I'm still a little sore at the "influencer" term but I'm beginning to accept that it applies and I should get comfortable with it!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#624

Post by hylaride »

masklinn wrote: post #566
hylaride wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subsidies played a huge role, including the eminent domain bulldozing of cities for free-at-use highways. If people had to pay upfront for those costs, the urban landscape would look much different (probably closer to Japanese cities, which do have massive suburbs, but centred around train stations). Yet Japan does still have cars (and a car culture even), they're just not necessarily the default or dominant mode of…

Sure, nobody is saying cars are useless or unfun, I'm just pushing back against the idea that everything car everywhere is a natural and intrinsic outcome from cars existing. As I noted, even in the netherlands cars are common , the dutch have a very dense road network, and a fair amount of cars.

I think we're on the same page.

For me, cars are a perfectly fine mode of transport, but the way so many places prioritize it over alternatives (whatever the reason) isn't necessarily better.

My "wtf" moment was 20 years ago when I was visiting my cousin in an exurb and we sat in a line of cars for over 40 minutes waiting for our turn to pick up her kid. The messed up part was that while there were school busses, everything was so spread out that the bus ride for them would have been over an hour and then another 20 minute walk from the arterial road drop-off point to their house. Everything was far away, including local public parks.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#626

Post by saberience »

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.

This is exactly what I find too, I make plans in both models and compare them in the other model. And Claude usually agrees (65-80% of the time) that the Codex plan included things it didn't think of, or was better in some other way.

Note, this is better than it was with Opus, where it was more like 90% of the time the Codex plans were obviously better.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#627

Post by pertymcpert »

RealityVoid wrote: post #621
nlawalker wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They matter.

Because?

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#628

Post by NCFZ »

saberience wrote: post #408
simonw wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to capture the idea that Claude Fable will act a whole lot more aggressively in pursuit of the goals that you set it than other models I've worked with. The case I described is a good example of this. I told it to fix a scroll bar, and it built test HTML pages and a throwaway Python server and tried several ways of testing in a browser before settling on a weird Frankenstein mechanism because it identifi…

It's not being aggressive, it's just trying throwing shit at problems until it sticks... or doesn't. That doesn't make it smart or aggressive, if anything it's just been turned to crank tokens until something happens, which doesn't make it a good model. Why are you positively anthropomorphizing this? It's an LLM, it's been tuned via RL, and it's been tuned by engineers at Anthropic to use a metric fuck-load of sub-ag…

> It's not being aggressive, it's just trying throwing shit at problems until it sticks... or doesn't.

The vast majority of the work the agent did was to reproduce the issue using the limited tooling it had access to. I don't see how that qualifies as "just trying throwing shit at problems until it sticks"

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#629

Post by nozzlegear »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #200
nozzlegear wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The science fiction AI of my childhood was Cortana, who was a lot more cool than a relentlessly proactive token torcher which burned 12 bucks to fix some CSS.

You can literally make Cortana with modern LLMs. Or something close to it. Especially as models like this are trained: https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models/

Sorry, I should've been more specific; like jrflowers said: the Cortana I was referring to was the AI character from the Halo series. I did have a Windows Phone though and thought the Cortana assistant was one of the coolest things back then!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortana_(Halo)

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#630

Post by firemelt »

sanex wrote: post #105
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've found the opposite. Granted I use sub agents heavily but I've had it run for hours with far fewer tokens used than when I was previously using opus4.6-8.

how did you use the sub agents any example of setup and usecase?
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