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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#661

Post by tabs_or_spaces »

tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #348

How can a LLM be assigned an emotion as being "proactive". This is highly misleading to anyone that scans just the headlines. What actually happened is that the user started a prompt, and Claude took $12 worth of tokens to resolve the issue. How it did so was basically looping until it got to the answer How is this proactive? It's literally being token greedy and maximising revenue for the LLM owner. People really ne…

> How can a LLM be assigned an emotion as being "proactive"

I can't edit my post, this is wrong. "Proactive" is defined as a behaviour instead of an emotion.

Thanks to everyone pointing it out!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#662

Post by foxglacier »

CalRobert wrote: post #367
killerstorm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the pressure of the auto lobby is really the reason. People feel cars are more convenient and more prestigious than riding on a bus. Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.

The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking. The US also had protests when drivers killed kids, but they were ultimately unsuccessful, except for the odd traffic light installation. https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-baby-carri... Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests…

Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#663

Post by dang »

Ucalegon wrote: post #313
simonw wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean by "objective" here. You're welcome to believe that the pricing I quoted is low and enterprise companies pay more than that, despite the abundant evidence I've provided in this thread. It sounds to me like you think I'm biased towards Anthropic, despite me highlighting how their model charged $12 for a two line CSS change due to it being "relentlessly proactive". (I also called their…

[flagged]

No HN user is allowed to harass any other HN user, regardless of who the accounts are. You've been abusing this terribly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500676

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500368

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499847

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499707

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499640

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499586

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48499552

I normally wouldn't ban you for this, since everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but your account has been aggressively attacking other users in other contexts as well (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137522). That's not ok, and I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#664

Post by tabs_or_spaces »

simonw wrote: post #402
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #348

How can a LLM be assigned an emotion as being "proactive". This is highly misleading to anyone that scans just the headlines. What actually happened is that the user started a prompt, and Claude took $12 worth of tokens to resolve the issue. How it did so was basically looping until it got to the answer How is this proactive? It's literally being token greedy and maximising revenue for the LLM owner. People really ne…

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…

Super appreciate you replying to my comment.

I think I understand where you're coming from now. What confused me is that the post is written in a way that it seemed like what Fable was doing was actually better. Maybe I should've looked at post as an exploratory post on Fable instead.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#665

Post by felixgallo »

saberience wrote: post #636
felixgallo wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm writing low-level Rust, distributed systems, also sandboxing tech which has to be secure and performant. The only thing I have Fable do now is create UIs or otherwise front-ends for systems where correctness doesn't matter as much. Anthropic models lead at making nice looking UIs for sure, but when it comes to making sure my Rust code is actually 100% correct and uses 1% of CPU most of the time, Codex is king.

definitely not in my experience. I usually write distributed systems and back end code, and Fable is so much better at those than Codex that it's not even a comparison. Fable feels like it's a year ahead.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#666

Post by aspenmartin »

peterbell_nyc wrote: post #542
piker wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry that wasn't a criticism of you! I completely see how it was misread that way. I would edit it now if I could. I was using you more as an example of a hypothetical programmer using it in this way. If the goal is to create a maintainable product, this isn't a great approach. If the goal is to learn about the model and its behaviors itself, of course this is a fantastic way to experiment. Yes, you might have learn…

Honestly my goal is to learn how to teach an agent to build a maintainable product, so I'm way more interested in the learnings at the agentic level (how to prompt/direct/manage context/restrict tool use, provide reusable shims, etc) than getting into the details of a css bug. That's just not a level of abstraction with sufficient leverage for what I'm trying to do. I stopped coding a while back because I could have…

Absolutely. All of these "but you could have done that easily" from frontend developers or backend developers or systems engineers -- like yea, if I have the time or interest in those things, sure. But I don't. I care about an end product way way more. Blows my mind that there are legions of people building things that they don't think are important enough to get to the finish line quickly and efficiently.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#667

Post by saberience »

felixgallo wrote: post #665
saberience wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing low-level Rust, distributed systems, also sandboxing tech which has to be secure and performant. The only thing I have Fable do now is create UIs or otherwise front-ends for systems where correctness doesn't matter as much. Anthropic models lead at making nice looking UIs for sure, but when it comes to making sure my Rust code is actually 100% correct and uses 1% of CPU most of the time, Codex is king.

definitely not in my experience. I usually write distributed systems and back end code, and Fable is so much better at those than Codex that it's not even a comparison. Fable feels like it's a year ahead.

Interesting, I’d love to see the comparisons of your system using Claude vs Codex. I have about 20 years of experience in distributed systems and super high scale at several faangs, and also building ai model serving infra for 20k transactions per second roughly.

For me, Claude makes bone headed decisions all the time, like glaring errors, not even particularly subtle.

But the more obvious flag is the amount of irrelevant code and tests which Fable writes. Like it regularly writes 2X or 3X the amount of code and tests that are needed. It’s an expert at writing plausible but entirely useless tests.

But I think that if you’re a more junior engineer or haven’t been around a the block you can easily think that “more code equals smarter”. Claude ends up creating a massive, hard to manage codebase, and if you look the Claude Code codebase (which was leaked), you can see I’m right!

The Claude Code codebase is terrible. And presumably Anthropic has been using their smartest models for working on Claude Code. I wrote my own coding harness with Codex (as a fun experiment) which used a fraction of the code and is about 100X more performant and memory efficient (than Claude Code)!

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#668

Post by rafram »

swyx wrote: post #635
rafram wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 seconds or a minute? Look at the diff he links to: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72... Every browser has an inspector that can show you which element is causing overflow. You walk through the tree, find the offender, and add min-width or overflow. Zero tokens, just like in the old days! Now, granted, because the garbage LLM code he’s working with has CSS inside HTML inside JavaScript in…

> Zero tokens, just like in the old days! because you zero rate your own human attention, which you should value

Alas, LLMs require more attention, not less.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#669

Post by bornfreddy »

dumbdumb125 wrote: post #187
_345 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

way worse things can happen than your machine being bricked, if a malicious actor can weaponize an agent to do their bidding

the solution to both of these is the same thing. vps with accounts for all the services specific to the agent (github and whatever else)

That's actually a great idea! Easier to setup and use than VM (hello ssh), safer than docker, and still pretty cheap. Thank you for the idea!
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