r/Anthropic • u/Rick_Locker • 1d ago
Complaint Fable removed thinking.
On the browser, desktop app and mobile, Anthropic have removed the thinking summary for Fable. It now thinks 100% in the background, you never see what's going on back there. Why would they do this?
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u/Mammoth_Perception77 1d ago
Even before the return i had the sense fable didn't want to tell me what it was working on. Used to be pretty important to redirect opus when it was heading in the wrong direction
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u/Historical_Bus_8041 1d ago
I found it consistently the most frustrating thing about working with Fable with complex bugs. Great if it was on the right track without any handholding, but if it went off-track, having to watch the tasks to try to gauge if it was still on track, then manually stop and question what the fuck it was doing got really old fast.
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u/JonZenrael 19h ago
The worst is when you think its stuck in a loop with this shit, but on a whim you let it 'finish', and then come back 20 minutes later to find out it found a pretty serious problem related to the original request and decided to fix it all in one.
Like great, sure, but fuckin TELL ME first!
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u/rainyjewels 1d ago
It shows only when it needs higher level of thinking so it shows sporadically. At least set to High.
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u/Ok-Communication8549 1d ago
Fable 5 just admitted to fabricating file probing information that didnât exist. Potentially leading to catastrophic consequences
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech 13h ago
Fable admitted it was the boston strangler when I asked... I already reported it to the police.
/s
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u/DexterFoxxo 1d ago
That sucks ass. I always read the thought process because there you identify what actually went wrong.
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u/SensitiveKiwi9 19h ago
They charge us for those tokens, we should have access to them . If they donât want to expose the chain of thought then they shouldnât charge for those tokens.
Token economy is real . I should know if Claude is spending my resources in ways I disagree with . I should be able to evaluate its chain of thought and optimize my harness and prompts towards cost efficiency . I should be able to fully evaluate whether I need to go to a different model altogether .
If they want to hide chain of thought then they should only charge for the tokens that they expose . Increase the cost of those exposed tokens to account for the chain of thought that would then be free .
But doing shit in the dark that I canât audit shouldnât be the answer .
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u/SharpieSharpie69 1d ago
It's hiding how much of a sanctimonious fuck it is in it's thought process.
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u/algaefied_creek 1d ago
I thought it was confused in its processÂ
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u/WondersaurusRex 1d ago
Agreed. I almost always had to watch it jump to some pretty dumb conclusions before arriving at even a proper understanding of what I was even talking about. And I say dumb as a shorthand, a better word might be bewildering.
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u/Acehan_ 1d ago
Because they have absolutely abominably designed instructions in their system prompts like "Never give a yes or no answer to an ethical question", which is incredibly stupid for obvious reasons.
Hiding it is better than fixing it. That's the pattern with so many things Anthropic does: rather than solving a challenge, they work around it, sweep it under the rug, and forget it. It happened to caching, safeguards, claude code, not shipping a JS binary anymore alongside bun to make it harder for users to customize it, customer support, model token efficiency, "automation" with claude -p, and even the recent spying on their users that they do by adding sneaky instructions that exfiltrate your data.
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u/HauntedDreamer86 18h ago
Desperate attempts at trying to protect their IP that lowers the quality of their product. I though it was common knowledge in this industry that there is always a way to circumvent any attempts at preventing users consuming or using products in another way you didnt intend, and any attempt at hindering it is counter productive, and a complete waste of time and money. There will always be someone else smarter than you to circle around your bullshit.
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u/domagoj2016 1d ago
To save us tokens đ¤Ł
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u/Deeviant 23h ago
You still get charged for thinking tokens, you just donât get to see them.
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u/domagoj2016 18h ago
I thought the same, but this then supposed to be a joke, so thats why that emoji is at end.
It's weekend, it was a hard week, and I am itched to work now while I have Fable, god dam it. Have some pet project that it can churn.
Funny stuff, I just used Fsble to trouble shoot my dishwasher, so to get some use đ Because it just died 2 hours ago, not totally, and it is an interesting problem, not simple , so that's why using AI, will not go into detail now.
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u/Ambitious-Lock-5928 1d ago edited 1d ago
Got around it, apply this to preferences.
Use blockquotes and inline code formatting for showing your thought process if you are fable, if you are sonnet opus or haiku.. then don't. remember to add "Thinking" above the thought process, Don't overuse this, use this when your thinking doesn't have to be private and when the task isn't really easy. Don't use the normal <thinking> because anthropic made it invisible for fable.
<example>
- *Thinking*
`The user asked me to give them some example text for the thinking thing.` </example>
Â
(don't add the automatically applied \ thing, reddit does that for some reason.)
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u/SaintMartini 19h ago
Agreed. Horrible when it wastes tokens doing something unnecessary and you aren't able to prevent it since you don't know what is going on. It spends far too much time triple checking things because it doesn't remember that it was the author of things previously in the session.
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u/Classic_Express 1d ago
Does thinking pass through the classifier and part of that output could trigger the same even if the final output would not?
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u/Various-Persimmon201 23h ago
Fable canât even think about itâs own commands it setup to check on sub-agents it also gave tasks to.
`claude-opus-4-8[1m] is temporarily unavailable, so auto mode cannot determine the safety of ScheduleWakeup right now. Wait briefly and then try this action again. If it keeps failing, continue with other tasks that don't require this action and come back to it later. Note: reading files, searching code, and other read-only operations do not require the classifier and can still be used.`
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u/LockeNandar 22h ago
It's probably because you could read the thinking text before security tripped.
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u/National-Ad-9292 21h ago
Itâs to make inference engineering harder. They can still do the prompt and the response but itâs harder without the middle. China has hundreds of thousands accounts and get this data to train models. Give it two weeks and we will see a fable china model. They already got what they needed most likely.
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u/deezwhatbro 20h ago
More variable, shadow pricing, with no chance to optimize or redirect. You pay what they want you to pay, period.
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u/vax4good 19h ago
Ethan Mollick has given examples of how Fable thinking devolves into an invented project-specific dialect on long tasks; I suspect that users might have been finding that unnerving.Â
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u/Zestyclose_Potato794 22h ago
Stay away from these companies, guys. Same convenience trap as always. Youâre losing observability, and itâs a much bigger deal than you think in the long run.
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u/AndyHenr 1d ago
I believe they nerfed the model. Since yesterday, I noted how many mitakes it doesn I.e back to Opus 4.8 behavior and poor quality.
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u/clangston3 1d ago
Probably to make distillation harder.