Hacker News Reader

Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

I've been working with it heavily since its first release. I use it for software architects, complex debugging and some development and I have not had it refuse or downgrade even once.

View on HN

I got downgraded for the first time today. Because I was using a library with the characters "bio" in it. The classifier is strict beyond reason. It got the name from a commit message in the git history (wasn't even in my prompt) and it immediately freaked out. I eventually got it to work by getting opus to write a plan, then editing the plan to strip out all references including commit hashes, then getting Fable to review and refine that edited plan. Eventually got it done. But what a pain.

That said, I've got it easy. My colleagues who are chemists and biologists can't even ask one question. There are so many triggers in their memories and workspaces they can't even ask a non-triggering question. And we all work in medical diagnostics, it's not like we're doing anything remotely nefarious. Fable could be such a benefit, but the limitations make it worthless.

Daily use here, about 2.5 weekly 20x limits, never got flagged for code topics including finding memory safety vulnerabilities in my C++ project, but just got flagged for the first time for biology-related topics because I asked it to implement crop genetics and cross breeding into my game. Was able to bypass it by having opus reword the prompt (gene -> trait, cross breed -> trait mixing), and, critically, insisted that it not use any biology related words in its thinking or responses.

That’s interesting. I find it completely unusable for even simple reviews of existing project documentation that I wrote for an iOS app that isn’t even in public distribution.

Have they ever talked about what goes into the classifier? I wonder how much your past chats impact it.

For example if it knows you do X at Y company is it more or less strict?

Yes their docs cover how to properly prompt it to ensure you don't get hit by the classifier, you can distil those down to a skill to help build prompts for the more challenging situations, e.g. https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding/blob/main/Skills/pr...

Same. I really am curious if either 1) I am using it in genuinely different ways or 2) these people are being willfully disingenuous.

I suspect there's some cargo culting, and some folks that are generally more likely to table flip than understand things that challenge their workflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com