But you just hit the nail on the head: "Solo software engineer can't create on of these now".
The current boom in AI and the cloud/social media boom in the recent decade have required ungodly amounts of capital for their resident companies to get off the ground. It's no longer a creative endeavour that basement hackers can participate in. In many ways it is toxic to the original nerd/hacker ethos by shutting out newcomers to the field and increasing wealth inequality, hence the hostility you now see on HN.
I think it felt more polished, otherwise they wouldn't have released it. Fable took more shortcuts, lied more, had stabilizing safeguards removed, and just did what it wanted more than other models.
I guess I don't understand why it's shady. It seems more like a poorly executed decision to enforce a publicly stated policy (it's been against Anthropic's ToS to use their models on frontier ML research for a while now). After all, people found out about this through their published system card.
It is definitely a bad idea to do this without notifying the user, because users who are incorrectly affected will have no way of providing feedback or getting support. And it is also anticompetitive, but if you truly believe that AI is not a normal technology, it is rational.
It's shady because they were going to silently poison your outputs.
It's actually worse than it sounds initially, because Fable isn't actually omniscient when it comes to safety classification. Many people (myself included) had refusals or fallback to Opus 4.8 for seemingly compliant/innocuous requests.
Wouldn't you be pissed off if they decided to sabotage your project despite having done nothing wrong?
The trouble is the silence, not Anthropic setting guardrails. Claude saying "I'm sorry, I can't assist further because it looks like you're [XYZ]" is fine.
We all know the false positive rates for classifiers on Fable. Imagine being a ML researcher working on any kind of ML/AI project that isn't against their ToS, and having your codebase poisoned and sabotaged silently.
To be fair, nerfing Claude on frontier research tasks is consistent with Anthropic's stated beliefs. So in that sense you can trust them to always behave consistently if strangely. But this launch was done very poorly with the lack of transparency on when the frontier research policy was violated.
Yeah and their belief are fucking crazy and dangerous. They are literally sabotaging their users. They built in malware into their model if you prompt it about training a fucking AI model. It doesn't tell you, no it literally sabotages you by editing your prompt and intentionally goes against your request.
You want fucking nut jobs like this building models?
It's one thing to build safeguards on your model and have it prompt the user back. I'm sorry I can't help you with this request. Chinese models do this for some requests.
It's another thing to actively try to make the model perform worst for your user on purpose because it asked the model to do something you, the model creator, didn't like.
Imagine someone is asking a logical medical question and the model swaps the prompt and purpose being less intelligent and gives bad advice to this person.
How do these people not understand they are stupid.
Is it really crazy to nerf a proprietary model to prevent it from training another model? I don't think that's even remotely similar to giving bad medical advice.
It’s not a nerf, it’s sabotage. That’s different. This is like if you’re driving a car and it detects your pulling up to a competing dealership so it cuts the brakes.
This is, in my mind, effectively malware. We don’t know exactly what code the model will inject, and we certainly don’t know when it will happen. It could very easily introduce vulnerabilities.
Given that the "proprietary" model is built on stolen work at an unprecedented scale, it's at the very least hypocritical to a degree that would not be possible without a fundamentally amoral mindset.
Huh? It's a benchmark by Cognition which (1) is building their own models and (2) offers all providers and thus has an incentive to avoid hyping up any one too much.
I think this says more about your type of work than anything. For bugfinding/incident response in distributed systems - which often involves extensive use of Datadog/Sentry MCPs and poring over heaps of logs in addition to reading tons of code - 4.8 has been significantly better than 4.6.
> Almost every programmer I know personally has a pretty measured opinion on where these things are useful and where they're not. The breathless hype seems mostly from non coders.
We have polar opposite media bubbles. I see OG programmers all over my timeline either grieving the "end of software engineering" (a la Ryan Dahl) or extolling "automatic programming" (a la antirez).
> We have polar opposite media bubbles. I see OG programmers all over my timeline
The person you’re replying to, in the bit you quoted, said specifically:
> Almost every programmer I know personally
People you know personally are not a “media bubble”. They are, to borrow your expression, polar opposites. It’s people you can speak with candidly and trust versus bits of text without the full context.
Ultimately though it's those people's bosses who set the direction and from my experience those people are telling you to your face that you'll be replaced by AI as soon as they're able to do so while they continuously fail to see it's shortcomings.
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