Discussion summary
Fable is now API-only, affecting how users run it, with some using it in loops for tasks like bug fixing. There are mixed opinions on its performance and use cases, with some noting improvements and others expressing skepticism.
What the discussion says
- Fable's API-only design limits looping use cases.
- Some users report successful overnight runs fixing bugs.
- Concerns about performance and suitability for certain tasks.
- Discussion about Fable's subscription plans and changes.
“Fable changes the game yet again, because it's API-only.”
“I just had Fable run overnight in a loop, fixing bugs.”
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- Hacker News
- It's really coming down to "Do we want to subscribe to a human with a salary of many ~$10000(s) ", or "Do we spend 100(s)$ on an AI subscription"
Even with it's issues, the latest models are going to disrupt the labor economics.
- There is a reasone we use left and right margin/padding.
This blog is quite unreadable for 27/32" monitors.
by zapnuk - I've read a lot of comments about using AI for coding, and my experience has been very different.
I work on large C++ applications used by international airlines. If this software failed, it would make national headlines.
Claude Code with Opus 4.8 is great at handling the boring code I don't want to write myself. It gets it right almost every time.
However I still review every change and test everything before committing.
Trust, but verify.
- Really interesting article but there's one thing I wanted to point out about the reasons for code review:
> If a company were shipping bugs at, say, a hundredth the rate we were at Centaur while relying primarily on review to catch bugs, then I could see their point, but that's not what's happening at the typical software company where people don't want to move away from human review [there might be non quality (as in non bug rate) related reasons to keep human review, such as keeping a high bar for code quality or keeping the codebase human-understandable, which pretty much immediately stops being the case if you let a fleet of agents go wild on a codebase] because of the perceived risk of shipping bugs.
I don't agree that the main point of a code review is quality assurance; there are other reasons that have more to do with team convergence and junior staff learning: https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/807.php
by jason_s - URL typo: "hange how he works](/productivity-velocity/)". (I make this kind of Markdown syntax error all the time and set up a lint for '](/'.)
You should talk to https://www.mechanize.work/ for sponsorship/credits and about environments.
by gwern - I can agree with Dan on two things: LLMs do often produce incorrect results and that it's still useful for productivity when used in moderation. For me the wrong results actually cause some kind of ragebait response so I become much more motivated to learn more about the subject to actually generate correct response. After I've learnt the subject area enough I find I'm better off having LLM review my code instead of writing it.
I haven't even begun to try to comprehend how to use fuzzing testing to improve the ability to find bugs, but it sounds really interesting. I've seen mutation testing to be very useful for finding gaps in tests, so I can only imagine that fuzzing + LLMs might produce insane results.
by nasretdinov - A lot of the crazy ideas seem to have melted away in the face of massive context sizes. Today, I can put roughly a megabyte of utf8 text into my system prompt before things start to get weird.
That is a massive amount of information even if we are being sloppy with it. You can read The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book cover-to-cover and still have room to spare. I would deeply struggle to develop a world model this detailed for any business. Anything that needs to get more specific than these narratives can be a SQL query tool into the data warehouse, grep over the codebase, MS graph API lookup, etc.
Giving the business a balanced way to collaborate over this one shared model of the world is a new challenge I am beginning to engage with. I've also noticed that the world model will compound on itself in terms of self-detection of update opportunities. The more constraints there are, the more likely we appear to violate one.
by bob1029 - I'd like to highlight a different part of the article:
> In general, when I talk to software folks about testing, I'm coming from such a different place that they immediately look at me like I'm an alien, so let's talk about how we tested at this hardware company I worked for, Centaur, which informs my biases about how I like to work. Some of the things that we did that were or are unorthodox in the software world are:
> Hired dedicated QA / test engineers, with testing being a first-class career path on par with being a developer - No code review by default - Virtually no hand-written tests - Constant testing via what programmers sometimes called property based testing, randomized testing, fuzzing, etc., although we just called those tests (hand-written tests were called "hand tests"). - Large regeression test suite (3 months wall clock to execute on compute farm) - No unit tests
Anybody here tried that (or a similar) approach? Especially going all-in on property based testing and fuzzing with no unit tests.
I tried that approach somewhere before and the initial results were promising, but ran into political issues so the idea was canned.
by duckmysick