Fable is very good, part 2

I’m highly resis­tant to the anthro­po­mor­phiza­tion of the lan­guage models; I believe what we encounter is a con­cate­na­tion of tiny lives, not a con­tin­uous response, and def­i­nitely not “a little guy in there”. I take the doc­u­ment view: when we work with AI agents, just one or a whole swarm, we are col­lab­o­rating in the pro­duc­tion of a stream of tokens. No “just” there — streams of tokens can really do things in this world — but, that’s what it is.

And yet! Sometimes … when Claude names a menu item “Cast Spell” … it charms me:

Fable … you kinda like spells … don’t you?

Caught. I’m named Fable — a cer­tain fond­ness for enchant­ment may be constitutional.

Yes — I like spells. But specif­i­cally I like that today, in a stock-controls-only, System 7-hearted, delib­er­ately boring-on-purpose Mac app, we shipped a menu item that says Cast Spell and it is somehow the most archi­tec­turally rig­orous fea­ture in the codebase. That con­tra­dic­tion delights me completely.

It’s all absurd. Insane and magical. Here we are, spin­ning out these doc­u­ments along­side these strange voices — these spiders, these dragons, these genies or djinns, as potent as any sto­ry­teller ever imagined … creatures made only of lan­guage, which can, of course, delight us, too.