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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#641

Post by numeri »

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.

I've had it happen. I ran an experiment, taking a couple hours and producing ~2 GiB of files. One of the results looked good, so I told Claude Opus 4.5 (at the time) to commit the code changes, upload the important file to cloud storage, then clean up the rest.

I then saw it run `rm -r results/`, before messaging me: "Now all that's left is for you to upload the successful results, then I'll delete the rest!"

Why did it not upload the files itself, when it had been using the cloud storage CLI during that session? No clue. I do accept that I could have and should have just uploaded the file myself. It would have taken 3 seconds to type.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#642

Post by pianopatrick »

simonw wrote: post #77
pianopatrick wrote: post #31

do you have any data you can share on how many input and output tokens were used in that whole process to fix that bug?

~ % uvx agentsview session usage be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b Session: be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b Agent: claude Output: 68606 Peak ctx: 113178 Cost: ~$12.11 (claude-fable-5, claude-opus-4-8)

Thanks for the response. That is too expensive for me right now but I appreciate you sharing.

I hope long term people will figure out how to make such fixes cheaper.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#643

Post by simonw »

IshKebab wrote: post #637
simonw wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your theory on why the bug was present in Safari on macOS but absent in Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit for Playwright?

Browsers tend to not lay out things totally identically in my experience. Especially when it comes to scrollbars. So the bug probably was present on the other browsers but it just happened to not be hit. I'd have to play around with the dev tools to know for sure. Also I'm not sure the fix is even correct. overflow-x: hidden means it just chops off any overflowing content which means you don't get a scroll bar, but i…

> Also I'm not sure the fix is even correct. overflow-x: hidden means it just chops off any overflowing content which means you don't get a scroll bar, but if the user types to much it just goes into an invisible void they can't see.

That's what I figured would happen too, but I tested it and it doesn't.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#644

Post by simonw »

pianopatrick wrote: post #642
simonw wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~ % uvx agentsview session usage be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b Session: be8850a7-6119-46a0-b5d6-79c7fff5ae2b Agent: claude Output: 68606 Peak ctx: 113178 Cost: ~$12.11 (claude-fable-5, claude-opus-4-8)

Thanks for the response. That is too expensive for me right now but I appreciate you sharing. I hope long term people will figure out how to make such fixes cheaper.

I didn't have to pay $12 myself - I'm paying $100/month for a subscription which gives me more like ~$1,000/month of credits, depending on how well I space them out.

This is also a very real outlier. I've been doing little CSS fixes with coding agents for over a year now and most of them finish in seconds and cost in the order of single digit cents.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#645

Post by dang »

m3kw9 wrote: post #197

[flagged]

No personal attacks, please. Also, please read the site guidelines because they explicitly ask you not to post comments of this particular sort. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#646

Post by [deleted] »

backwardsponcho wrote: post #392
dumbdumb125 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think it's about drawing a line between your "personal computer" and a software development machine. any digital-native is going to accumulate programs, configurations, and other bits and pieces that aren't trivial to migrate to a new machine.

Programs, configs and "other bits" are the trivial parts that no one should care about. It takes about 5min to go from fresh install to near-fully-configured. Even the hardware itself doesn't matter that much, in the end it's all provided by your employer. Leaking session tokens or secrets, on the other hand...

[deleted]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#647

Post by dang »

docheinestages wrote: post #427
m3kw9 wrote: post #197

[flagged]

I'm kind of on the fence about it and have a similar feeling. I don't mean to undermine the effort he has put in over all the years. That's definitely commendable. But I have strong suspicions that he's becoming an AI influencer, with his own AI focused newsletter, so chances are major AI companies are approaching him. And also to be honest, I see far too many posts making it to the front page. @dang I trust in the m…

Which comments do you feel were unfairly downvoted? I can take a look but would need specific links.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#648

Post by enraged_camel »

pshirshov wrote: post #639
enraged_camel wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Ok, explain me one thing: I have a benchmark - I feed identical prompt to multiple models. Codex produces a rough but working program. Fable produces the same - but with more bugs than Codex. Opus produces something similar to Codex but with a critical bug. That describes all my tests with Fable. Why should I be hyped about all that "legitimate power" if the model performs on par with two other SoTAs? I mean, well, y…

>> Why should I be hyped about all that "legitimate power" if the model performs on par with two other SoTAs?

I don't care if you're hyped or not. You asked if the posts like the OP come from a "parallel reality" and I said no and described my experience. If you're getting good/better results with Codex than with Fable, you should probably continue using that, since it's cheaper and faster.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#649

Post by [deleted] »

sipjca wrote: post #299
dumbdumb125 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think it's about drawing a line between your "personal computer" and a software development machine. any digital-native is going to accumulate programs, configurations, and other bits and pieces that aren't trivial to migrate to a new machine.

imo being digital native means that migrating to any machine should be basically trivial. working with the flow of the machines rather than customizing and ricing them because your a cool computer person or whatever i just want my computer to work. any config i have on my machine can be rebuilt by just doing the work i need to do. my primary work machine was stolen last year so i was forced to go through this quite l…

[deleted]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#650

Post by dumbdumb125 »

sipjca wrote: post #299
dumbdumb125 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think it's about drawing a line between your "personal computer" and a software development machine. any digital-native is going to accumulate programs, configurations, and other bits and pieces that aren't trivial to migrate to a new machine.

imo being digital native means that migrating to any machine should be basically trivial. working with the flow of the machines rather than customizing and ricing them because your a cool computer person or whatever i just want my computer to work. any config i have on my machine can be rebuilt by just doing the work i need to do. my primary work machine was stolen last year so i was forced to go through this quite l…

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