Comment by johnsmith1840
13 hours ago
I'm a heavy user and fable is great the #1 reason I stopped using it was the horrible safegaurd filter. I found sol close enough in capability and have only been blocked when my request was an obvious offensive cyber work. Fable blocked me on almost everything.
Optimizing a OS build? -> block
Securing a container -> block
60% is nowhere near enough for that safegaurd system. This just means I am going to be blocked half as much? Any long running task will likely get blocked.
Say you give a single big prompt and fable goes off for 6hrs of work. At hr 5 it gets blocked you now have the option of a much dumber model taking over and wrecking it or losing the entire 5hrs of work. That risk is beyond terrible and deffinetly not worth a 5-10% percieved improvement on my end. I previously would just bring sol in when that happened and realized sol is stupidly close in capability.
I never hit Anthropic's safety filter when I'm doing something illegal, only when I'm not.
I hit the safety feature when I ask something I saw that blocked other biologists: "why did the chicken cross the road?"
Due to my standard cancer research work I'm blocked from Fable.
That said, with how execrable all the 5 models have been, I can't imagine I'm missing much. It's impossible to get an intelligible explanation in text out of the 5 models, and the mistakes are just comically bad on anything that's not code.
Cancelled my subscription, and can't imagine going back since OpenRouter gives me a consistent model that I can trust won't change underneath me.
Why would cancer work be safeguarded? Are they afraid some cartel is going to, like, invent a stronger cancer?
4 replies →
They have some allowance flags, you should email them.
Honestly, unless what you are doing is frankly illegal, it usually is possible for you to get around most safeguards for coding things if you also know how to write code. Most problems have a separable completely innocuous core that Fable would gladly do. Then you can implement the problematic parts yourself. Particularly things like copyright issues, web scraping etc.
> Then you can implement the problematic parts yourself.
Or with another LLM, but yeah. The only issue is when it's a monorepo and fable does ls/grep. I've got a file named `system_prompt` in a completely innocent project and as soon as fable accidentally stumbled upon it - cyber.
Hacked together something with omp and sandbox-exec so that only whitelisted models can see some parts of the project. Works pretty well.
If it doesnt have a context (what you are using it for) then it's happy to do it. If you have X amount of code you can ask it to generate (X/5)5 and there is no problem. Like you said, you have to know what you are doing. You have to know what it needs to write so that you can tell it to write the parts.
I only use OpenAI models, and Sol is the only one to refuse me yet, and ofc it was completely bogus and I was unable to convince I was just working a regular bug for a well-known product for a well-known company using my official github account.
Aaargh.
It dramatically improved about a week ago - most of my blocked projects are now completely functional.
Ironically, having never been flagged - I've just restarted Claude Desktop and it's flagged a conversation that has already been completed.
In a long session pulling data from all over the place it created a pretty PDF.
"create this as a google doc that can be commented on"
Done — the full v0.5 content is now a Google Doc in your Drive...
"Ah, the formatting has gone. Do it in google slides please"
The brand studio has a native Google Slides path for exactly this — building the deck now.
Google Slides created.
Then today:
Chat paused Edit and retry with Fable 5 Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message. This sometimes happens with safe, normal conversations. Continue with Opus 4.8, send feedback, or learn more.
Details: [reasoning_extraction]
The last time i ran into that issue it suggested to make sure that a Fable AGENT took over the long-horizon task because, for some reason, agents in a session don't get blocked for security reasons. This may not always be possible, but it worked for me.
That's a good idea but it works from the change in context no? So you lose context from your big model. It's a good suggestion though.
No idea if subagents are not blocked, but you can set the starting method for subagents to "fork", then they inherit the main agents context
Do you have the prompt for these? I ask because I have recently asked Fable's help with hardening a docker container (custom dev container CC sandbox) and it didn't get triggered on it at all.
The safety filter is simply no longer an issue.
The blocks that fustrate me more are tool permisissions. I ask to do something then flip to another screen and come back to see it never started
Auto permission is what ya need.
> Optimizing a OS build? -> block
Why would fable block optimizing an OS build