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Comment by ImageXav | Hacker News Reader

I've been avidly using Fable since it was re-released and while it has been excellent at building the apps I want, the reasoning has been completely opaque.

Kim, however, has exposed the whole reasoning trace, or enough of it to matter. I'd almost forgotten how nice it is to see this. I've been able to see all of the weird twist and turns it takes and it is joyful. But also, far, far more informative and means I can debug ideas far more thoroughly. Also, at a first glance it seems to have gotten quite far on a niche hobby horse of mine that no LLM has been able to crack. I'll be testing this more for sure.

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I have severe complaints about Anthropic's product managers on this front. Their preference for hiding, obscuring, and trying to wrest control from the user are a bit harrowing. It would be wonderful to go back to Claude Code from before March. It seems like every release destroys value for me!

It's a defensive tactic to reduce the effectiveness of distillation.

Say of that what you will, but it's not because they want to wrest control from users.

It's because they don't want Chinese companies to do exactly what Moonshot (Kimi creators) and others have done.

Anthropic’s position being that it is entitled to train models on the creative works of anyone at any time, but its own slop generators’ outputs are sacred jewels that must be protected from being learned from.

Its not surprising a thief would be the most paranoid in securing their spoils.

According to Pat Toulme, the thinking traces and outputs that the Chinese researchers distilled are useful for getting initial trajectories, to prevent a cold start during RL. Once you get those initial correct trajectories (the model actually solving a task), you can generate you own new traces, so the distillation is already done, there is no need for further reasoning traces. Sure they could probably get better alignment with the frontier by distilling fruther, but in any case the damage is already done, at this point hiding reasoning is mostly just hurting users

It's funny because Anthropic is harming my use of their product, to not even stop the supposed theft of their thought chains. Something that any other supposed upstarts could presumably grab from Moonshot or whatever now.

And my complaint also extends to all their tool use explanations, or rather the lack thereof. I get prompted continually for tool use that I can't examine, that's a poorly formatted 1kb bash script, etc. The PM desire to hide valuable information while requiring extensive interaction has really driven the product into a very unusable place compared to where it was a few months ago. (Or perhaps that's just Claude responding to its memory of my use, and I have somehow driven it to be excessively verbose and difficult to use, which would be unfortunate... Perhaps there's a way to reset the memory.)

The reasoning is key as most of the time the summary provided by fable is not enough to understand the choice and correct the logic. You have to either fully trust it or go to an exhaustive code review. This with the fact that you can only use 4.8 to security review the code produce by fable are the reasons I will not renew my anthropic subscription, the current experience is way to degraded.

What will you be replacing it with, if anything?

And recently, since GPT 5.6, OpenAI basically doesn't show anything but a single line, 5 word titles of reasoning traces - titles of summaries of reasoning i presume.

It's effectively just a completely hidden thing now.

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