With GPT 5.5 it never got in the way.
Now it's infuriatingly deciding to reject the most basic actions used hundreds of times before. It just gave me this gem:
> The push to GitLab was blocked because the repository's privacy status couldn't be confirmed. Since the code is private, do you explicitly authorize pushing it to the configured origin on gitlab.com, so the merge request can be opened?
This is not a new project, and Codex has opened a hundred merge requests without issue before.
I paid for a year but am going back to Kagi's multi-model system [2].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7913059/ Don't Do It
(he, in this case, would not be the llm but the people over it)
I find those kind of limitation very dystopian and way more dangerous than the threat they claim to fight against.
But it's a rather annoying service if the customer can't predict in advance what sort of tasks they're willing to take on. You should have some idea about what they're normally willing to do for you.
Whether the book takes the form of an llm or an online website or a printed book is merely implementation details.
I recall Microsoft's Sidney having a hilarious one regarding the date or something. Anyone have a link to that?
While Fable reverts to Opus for simple questions like "What is digestion?"
Same for graphics, visual consistency, anything around the "does the look make sense and is pleasing" really, which makes claude design such a (good) surprise, I hope very hard for a Codex equivalent. And Gemini "gets" graphics.
Claude is definitely a code and cowork tool first, that's where it shines.
[1] HN thread on my post in January https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488396
I use Opus 4.8 with OMP/Pi coding agent and Matt Pocock Skills installed. I use professional/polite/questions-based communication pattern with Opus and it seems to work fine for coding. I am always aware that I need to justify my requests so it doesn’t barf.
Of course, I would never use Claude for anything customer-facing. It’s woke to the point of being fanatical.
I decide what is in scope, what I work on, and what needs fixing! It drives me nuts, it's like it's trying to avoid doing work
This behavioral change is actually official (https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5):
> For Fable 5, we made this safety margin much larger than in any prior launch (row B), meaning that many more benign requests would be blocked. We understood that these kinds of false positives would be frustrating for users, but made this tradeoff in the interest of making the model’s other capabilities widely available.
We're using human language against a system that produces human-like output, which tricks our brain into having similar expectations.
Since then, I've been less impressed.
"No knowledge in Kamar-Taj is forbidden. Only certain practices."
You reminded me of that quote from the Doctor Strange movie.
Even the most "dangerous" knowledge can be life-saving, depending on the circumstances. When I was a teenager, I read the Terrorist's Handbook, which was a text file circulating on bulletin boards. After 9/11 it vanished, because posession was considered a crime in some jurisdictions.
Knowing how to build a bomb is useless and/or dangerous in civilian life. Ask a Ukrainian if it is useful knowledge!
Knowing all about nuclear weapons doesn't mean you're going to blow up a city. But if someone else does, then you'll have the knowledge needed to avoid the worst of the radiation and maybe survive.
It'll be dystopian when that'll become your only source of information, and we're working on getting there. If you want to be horrified, look at what students (in school and post-secondary) are doing these days.
It's insane to offload your thinking and knowledge to a machine owned by other people, but you have to if you want to keep up with the rat race.
I've been using DuckDuckGo's multi-model service for my "ask an AI random questions" needs. I was already paying them and discovered this LLM thing is part of my subscription. Works pretty well and has privacy guarantees I'd expect out of DDG, though I think they've been tightening the usage you can get out of it recently.
I'll have to try Kagi if DDG gets much tighter.
cyanydeez•1h ago
This is more about how MBAs are wanting to mediate between you and the knowledge than anything else.