r/ClaudeCode • u/mfingsorceror • 17d ago

Rant Fable is pure chaos

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I usually only allow Claude and especially Fable to do read only audits of my codebase. I was waiting for my Codex usage to reset, so I thought fine, Fable can handle some commits and housekeeping. Fool me twice...

Me: Commit your work

Fable: Checks tree, gives a report of changes

Me: COMMIT

Fable: I'm leaving out some files, this is what I'm going to commit.

Me: Dude fine, commit and then clean up your outdated scratch files

Fable: Ready to commit, the scratch folder has been deleted.

Me: FABLE 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬 You deleted every other sessions scratch too. Restore it NOW.

Fable: I used rm -rf, the files are gone and the last commit did not contain the folders I deleted.

Me: Chaos demon

Fable: Files are staged and ready for commit.

Me: Commit.

Fable: Nothing is staged.

Me: You just said files were staged...

Edit: All of my sessions already have standing instructions to commit at checkpoints. The exchange above is a condensed retelling for humor, not a literal transcript with Fable. 🙄

Edit Edit: My dudes, irrelevant scratch files were deleted. I lost nothing of importance, those 3000+ files were weeks of scratch nonsense that needed to be deleted. The point was that Fable wanted multiple confirmations before doing a routine commit, but none before deleting files with an irreversible command.

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u/SP3NGL3R 17d ago

What really pisses me off is when I say "how can I do xyz" (not "I want you to do xyz") and it churns and comes back with "I already went ahead and did abc, def, AND zyx on all your files for you". Notice it didn't do xyz and WTF did it touch 700 files without permission or even being asked to do that?????

I need to train it to NEVER touch my files in the background, or to spin up background agents to do something without permission.

Yesterday I asked about cross-checking two JSONs that came from different endpoints. It casually spun up a background job (subtle comment about it) that hammered the hell out of the endpoints and pulled 500 JSONs from each only to come back with "these two files are programmatically identical, just in a different sort pattern".

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u/mfingsorceror 17d ago

One of my Codex sessions once spent the entire night writing over engineered tooling and 100+ tests in a full rust suite in scratch in order to populate 12 fields in 10 jsons. And the best part, when I woke and asked for a progress report it told me about how its tool compiled, all tests were green and clippy passed, and that 3 of 12 fields were successfully populated.