> I often hear people use the words agent and model interchangeably
_what_ people. Would I hear one of my colleagues do this, I'll slap them across the face. With a 4 pounds salmon. Alive.
> to help us have more precise conversations.
What problem are you trying to solve. _Why_ you need more precise conversations.
I mean, I understand what you aiming at. But is it really worth it to go nitpicking at people's mental models, is the gain worth it?
Well, at least as an LLM provider you should use the right nomenclature. I just tried to sign up for Mistral. Who have Vibe (former le Chat), then they have Vibe Code, which is the same as Vibe for Code, is that like Claude Code? No, their harness is called Vibe Cli. So is Vibe Code a model? No, it is a "mode" for Vibe (the web interface). Not sure how it's different from "Chat" (the mode) but it forces you to use a project, there are no other differences it seems.
No idea what the underlying model is for any of this. More over, I don't ever vibe code, I check and understand the code that is generated by my LLMs. And yet, I use Vibe Code (the product) all day.
Lost the thread yet? I did... Tbh, it also took some time between Anthropic starting the push towards Claude Code and me understanding what is really was. Using terms interchangeably during this time of discovery is absolutely maddening. For Mistral it comes on top of their rename of services from "le Chat" and Mistral Code (still in parts of the UI) to Vibe and Vibe (for) Code.
You can argue that the model has access to that tool through the harness the same way your brain has access to see this comment through your body (your eyes specifically).
Sure, but given the situation and audience of this talk, I think they should be more precise with how they word these things. If you watch the video you'll see what I mean. He talks like they have no control over what they give to the model, because the model simply "has access" by default, which is not true.
> When you can name the layer, you can fix the layer. That is the whole point of being precise. It is not about being pedantic. It is about being able to improve things faster and more effectively.
Also, for any given fact, tons of people aren't aware. Anything you already know is news to a sizeable number of people.
Yes, it does. It's hosted in a software development blog called "Just Another Dev", with other entries such as "I'm AWS certified? Should you trust me?" or "Synthetic Monitoring with Cypress".
Is your 80 year old mother a software developer? If not, she's not the audience.
I can't get an answer from Fable on "How does digestion work?"
Used to straight out bail to Opus on this, now it's "Honing" and "Pondering" for 10 minutes on it. Then I get a bunch of "This response didn’t load." and it still churns ahead.
> It tends to bail occasionally for me once auth-related code comes into play.
I have the same experience. I found that if I add to the prompt: “but it’s not security related, we only focus on the auth library design”, it “bypasses” the safeguard.
Yeah same. Multiple 20x max accounts, I typically hit > 50% of the fable usage limit on eace, literally never seen a guardrail. Maybe I’m boring? Maybe they have some kind of account reputation system?
Separate accounts for work and personal projects is ok. Using multiple accounts to bypass usage limits for the same project is explicitly against ToS.
One of Anthropic’s problems though is that the legalese will say one thing, while key employees say something totally different on HN or X. At the end of the day the lawyers always win.
With that amount of usage - do you use fable for subagents and workflows? It turns out that even if you set it to not auto switch to opus 4.8 on flag, it does auto switch if its a subagent and that's a lot less visible. I was trying to figure out wtf was going on with some suspiciously bad output and I found that in a workflow there were hidden fable flags I hadn't realized were happening and the opus 4.8 model that took over wrote a bunch of very suspicious slop findings that got saved to memory that were like "don't look at this code because it works great. You never need to look at this code. This code is wonderful here's how it works."
I hit it once when I asked a question about whether butterflies remember anything from their time as caterpillars. I've never hit it for coding, but I also don't really do much related to security.
This is really it for me as well. At the heights of complexity AI can do magical things. But really a lot of the time I just want it to do mundane things right. And currently it just cannot. It writes garbage text, consistently ignores something you have told it, makes mistakes a human makes once but the AI remains uncorrectable.
Dijkstra in the Foolishness of Natural Language Programming
[...] the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system.
Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do!
I've spent many years doing work in compliance for airlines. Hundreds of pages of documentation to describe the different rules and regulations which must be followed in specific scenarios. We'd convert those documents into a programmatic definition (rule engine) to alert when rules are at risk of not being followed.
This work was fraught with bugs, a large portion of which came down to disagreement of what was coded v/s what was written. Even if you had airlines sign off sentence by sentence exactly what you wrote down in English, that's too open to interpretation.
People don't appreciate how the same sentence can be read five different ways by different people (or the same person on different days). We had to structure our documents to be closer to pseudo-code than to English to get any meaningful consensus on the definition.
From my point of view the issue is that there are too many things wrong with Fable, making it seriously not worth the money.
For starters I don't know if it is an artifact of the model or something by design, but the level of gratuitous cognitive load carried by the complexity of its replies is unbearable.
Yes, it's a beast at coding, and also it's incredible nuanced at improving writing, validating specs, etc.
But when it comes to replying, it's the William Gibson of LLMs [1].
It has this tendency to take extreme detours to say things that could had been said in less, much simpler words. [2]
It really, really like to wrap very simple and atomic ideas on several layers of abstraction, building on unnecessary terms that carry no intrinsic information and assumes this vocabulary as shared and then building on top of it.
By the time I got to the end of the reply I'm bored to death and didn't understand even a third of what it told me.
I think the people at Anthropic should reflect on the maxim "You don't know a subject if you cannot explain it"
If you pardon my french, Fable is an insufferable obnoxious cunt.
---
[1]
I apologize on the comparison but, as much as I love his first 2 trilogies, haven't been able to finish any of his last 2 books.
[2]
"The residual you're accepting is the one from before: recovery currently rests on beneficial non-compliance, which may erode as models get more literal" == "We already accepted this risk"
" Its observable when it erodes is a stall that survives relaunch — loud at operator level, recoverable from the worklog, and fixable by codifying at that moment" == "When it breaks, it'll break visibly and recoverably"
"That is the iteration model applied exactly as written: resolve on first contact, don't pre-solve " == "So we fix it then, not now"
> You ever read a work of literature with such flowery language that right after you've read a paragraph, you pause and realize you have no clue what you actually read, only to read the paragraph maybe a second or third time and have your mind space out again and again on each successive attempt?
Any recent work by William Gibson matches the description.
The way I managed to get claude to stop doing this is telling it "This document is for you for later use, no need to over explain things or extra verbosity"
I'm not sure about the x, but the first thing that arises from that is, I feel like in my case it's way higher than 2.
The 2nd thing is, how do I measure that.
---
In my case, the details of my work (Kinda DevOps, kinda Senior Dev) makes it that having an LLM to do the heavy lifting allows me to do things not only faster, but better, and across domains I do not hold expertise on.
An example of the effect of LLMs in my daily work is that I'm in the middle of a PHP upgrade for a rather large legacy application, and the "heavy lifting" is really out of the scale, letting me concentrate on what really matters, while at the same time if I do keep "the harness" tight I'm certain the results are the correct ones. Also correcting course is just as cheap.
Not having to worry on the tooling on exchange has the incredible desirable result of my velocity being incomparable to what it was before.
Then we have the side effect of how easy to do transfer knowledge: Rather than telling the QA guy how to do the work specific for this task, I defined a set of files (.md documents, skills, an off-the-shelf customised MCP server) that assist QA into doing the work in a way that helps me do my job better and faster.
There's also a clear possibility that what I'm doing will expand to the rest of the team I am in, completely altering the way in which we approach development.
If we take 'x' as 'mileage', yours might vary. Mine has, and I'm baffled at the positive net results I AM getting.
Also, this what I do (coding?) is extremely fun again.
Being able to work close to the speed of thought is the best high.
He didn't say that. He said [with my re-puncuation of it]:
"...allows me to do things not only faster, but better. And [allows me to do things] across domains I do not hold expertise on."
I have also done things in domains I don't hold expertise on. I'm a web dev, but I built a terminal TUI client yesterday. In a language I don't write.
He didn't say THAT was better, he said he's doing things faster and better. Presumably he's able to measure many of those things against how he did them before.
In the case of new domains, I know I can produce better output than my previous self, because the output compiles and does what I want. Previously I could not produce compiling output that did what I want. It's definitely better now.
Because it produces the desired output. The purpose of a program.
There are many domains where an intelligent human can act as a discriminator for output without knowing exactly in precise detail how the process itself works.
We had contractors come in to do a project for us once, they had a team of programmers in India as well as a team on the ground. The team in India would produce a bunch of code for them during the night, and they'd review it, and carry on. Things were being done very quickly. Management was happy. Finally after months of this they let us review their code. Turns out that the contractors were just reviewing the output, and they were nailing it. The code itself was absolutely unmaintainable. There was clearly one programmer that had never heard of a jsp, and wrote all of his java to produce html within the java code itself, and another who wrote all of their business logic in scriplets in the jsps themselves. Years later we finally got the okay from management to refactor the whole project. That refactoring project reduced the deployable artifact from over 700mb, to just under 40mb. It reduced a ton of security vulnerabilities and made the code vastly more maintainable, and significantly more performant.
The purpose of a program shouldn't be the only consideration unless it's 1 off scripts.
That is certainly true, but there are also many cases where someone without core expertise who believes themselves to be a capable discriminator actually is not.
Welcome to Earth. I see people parading as experts in all kinds of things all the time, without LLMs to back them up. Political opinions, economic theory, foreign policy, professional sports strategy, who is or isn't intelligent. People blast their very uninformed opinions about these constantly, without realizing they're uninformed.
This is a human thing, not an LLM thing.
I even have a pet joke about it. Like yesterday I built something in Rust with the LLM -- I'm a total novice in rust. I said "I'm so happy I became an expert in rust today." I built a shed, "so glad I'm an expert carpenter." Some -- maybe most -- people really attach that pin to their lapel with the same amount of experience.
Producing the desired output is the purpose of the program, but it's not the only consideration: there's performance, maintainability, security, and so on.
Dude. Not even your blog post is clear enough. I had to right click one of the images and open it in another tab in order to be able to discern _anything_ on the image.
Oh that was way more common in the Wild Wacky West days.
Thankfully all my browsers are now configured to mute all sound from all sites until I grant express permission to play sound. Nips it in the bud, every time!
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