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Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

simonwillison.net

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Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#721

Post by gaflo »

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…

Thanks for documenting your personal observations. I do have a few questions. First, could you expand by giving other examples on how you observed this model to be relentlessly proactive? From my personal experience with prior frontier models using both Claude Code and Codex I found them to already be quite proactive depending on the domain (although Codex a bit less so, which I personally prefer). The main task that they seemed to struggle with for me are tasks that naturally have long run times for the programs the agents wrote, as they didn't seem to have a good intuition for when/how to change approach to minimise the time spent on the task. Specificically if you are trying to scrape sites/services that are heavily guarded against programmatic access or running automated tasks that call LLMs (such as indexing or document extraction). I'm not surprised that for web dev the proactiveness is the most obvious improvement, as I would expect the most common use case with the most training data to be the biggest priority. I have previously built a similar workflow as you described Fable 5 to auto test changes to the website and while it worked somewhat well, it often couldn't identify obvious flaws to the human eye, such as overlapping text or inconsistent font choices as well as bad layout decisions. I do like it for quick prototyping, but the testing and design decisions were not ones I would hand off at this moment. Did you notice improvements in these areas? Can you share how it does for long running programs?

If you want I can give you some more specific instructions to test, but I would also be happy to hear from your own use cases.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#722

Post by dgellow »

soulofmischief wrote: post #688
dgellow wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW TLS had a non negligible impact on performances at scale. Hardware improvements made that irrelevant, eventually making the switch to HTTPS by default a no brainer (or at least that's what I vaguely remember from <2010)

We could say the same about virtualization, effective containerization, layered LLM calls, and other techniques currently being explored for effective sandboxing.

There is some performance impact but modern hardware make that pretty insignificant

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#723

Post by risyachka »

simonw wrote: post #694
risyachka wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Getting the best results out of these models requires skill, experience, intuition, and domain expertise. domain expertise has nothing to do with llms. On the contrary, to have it you need to avoid llms. >>you risk prompting Claude Fable 5 like it's GPT-4o Thats fine because when GPT came out you had to treat it like a baby, GPT2 and around that time "Prompt engineering" was a thing. Now its all dead. After opus 4…

> domain expertise has nothing to do with llms. On the contrary, to have it you need to avoid llms. It has everything to do with LLMs. Go ask Claude Fable to write you a two page position paper on how the European economy recovered after World War II, suitable for submission to a conference for economists. It will do exactly that (well, probably, Fable can find all sorts of reasons to refuse) - and the value of what…

But this is exactly what I meant.

You need expertise. But you can acquire it only by doing. So LLMs won't help you here. You need to put in the work.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#724

Post by SepiaSapient »

peteforde wrote: post #711
SepiaSapient wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> target for all manner of negativity ranging from snark to harassment to malicious action We get get the Borg-esque "resistance is futile" spiel, someone asks for examples. One guy (kinda smugly tbh) points us to his (neat) online course website, claiming that it took him 1 month to rebuild with Claude, ergo GP is right and the non-AI dev is destined to extinction. As WooCommerce didn't end all web development befor…

That is not a coherent reply to my point, which is that you guys are like school yard bullies to people naive enough to throw chum into the water. We've seen this play out so many times. Nobody working on anything serious is going to volunteer to be a target for your BS. I sincerely wish that people would stop falling for the "prove you're not hallucinating" trap. If winning was possible - and it's not - there would…

I didn't say Mr. Johnny was hallucinating, or that he's lying. Was finding the "Written by humans" humorous the most polite comment ever? No, but it is absurd to call it harassment. Specially considering it matched his energy.

His website is cool, and from what I could skim from the content I'm sure his clients are happy and find it worthwhile. I'm not being facetious. He said Claude saved him time, which is true. Regardless of that, I believe he wildly overestimated how much time it would've taken. A website that could be a Wordpress install with plugins isn't technically interesting. It does not validate what @halfmatthalfcat said.

LLMs are capable and impressive. I'm not doubting that, but we do this song and dance [0] each time of grandiose statements and subsequent disappointment. My wariness is not violence against you or anybody.

I specially resent being called a bully for not coaching my language in every possible way. I'm not the avatar of your every forum trauma.

https://www.theregister.com/special-features/2026/01/26/curs...

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#725

Post by dreis_sw »

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.

It's well known that companies with an abundance of raw technical skills but poor judgement tend to fail. On the technical side technical debt accumulates, while on the business side the wrong choices are made. I think it's valid to generalize this to AI.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#726

Post by dr_dshiv »

mrandish wrote: post #343
dr_dshiv wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's actually what I do too. What I was trying to say is that my prompts are precise in the sense that whether they're vaguely ambiguous or hyper-detailed and highly directive it's always very intentional to improve the response in the direction I want. The difference can have significant impact as shown in research on how LLMs naturally mirror user's prompts. I noticed this last year and started experimenting whic…

[dead]

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#727

Post by dangerlego5 »

gaflo wrote: post #721
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…

Thanks for documenting your personal observations. I do have a few questions. First, could you expand by giving other examples on how you observed this model to be relentlessly proactive? From my personal experience with prior frontier models using both Claude Code and Codex I found them to already be quite proactive depending on the domain (although Codex a bit less so, which I personally prefer). The main task that…

The visual regression point is interesting. In my experience, the models that do best at "overlapping text/bad layout" catches are the ones being fed actual screenshots rather than DOM snapshots. If Fable is doing screenshot-based diffs natively, that would explain an improvement there, but I haven't verified it.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#728

Post by mdp2021 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #714
mdp2021 wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing freedom of movement to a killing device is beyond any threshold of plausibility. And the whole sentence above is unintelligible here. No, it's really that the ability to move at ease is priceless.

Car crashes kill roughly as many Americans each year as guns. If you add pollution impacts, cars double the yearly deaths of guns.

> Car[s...] kill

And in a Cost/Risk/Benefit computation, cars remain incommensurately invaluable. Because one's Quality of Life without them would simply be destroyed, comparatively. The moving "castle" (legal term in the USA) can be more important than the house in crucial regards.

The point attempted at post 48501189 remains unintelligible. That cars imply risks and externalities does not clarify it.

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#729

Post by _heimdall »

oulipo2 wrote: post #564
dahart wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

El Niño has been occurring naturally for more than 10,000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_...

The frequency and magnitude of the event is directly related to the warming up of climate

By related to I assume you mean correlates with though. To be fair, we can't say there is a causal link (even if it does seem very likely).

Re: Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

#730

Post by killerstorm »

masklinn wrote: post #359
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.

> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force. Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA. NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pij…

My view on this is based on situation in Ukraine: Ukraine definitely didn't have any car lobby at least until 1990 as Soviet Union was heavily investing into public transportation and did not profit from car sales.

Still, general opinion on cars was that you should buy one if you can, even if you're not going to use it for commute.

I doubt there was any car lobby in independent Ukraine as national car makers were just bad, and foreign were competitors. But general opinion on cars got to a point where not having a car when you can afford it (and can learn to drive, etc.) is considered weird.

So I'm afraid car dominance is just what happens naturally in a capitalist environment, and countering it requires an effort - e.g. eco-conscious population, urban planning and public transport optimization, etc. And Netherlands is such a country, as far as I know, but it just doesn't happen by default.

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