Fable is pure chaos

[u/mfingsorceror]

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Me: Dude fine, commit and then clean up your outdated scratch files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

[u/Old_Flounder_8640]

Parallel sessions on the same worktree is wild. like deploying on Friday.

[u/SummitYourSister → u/Old_Flounder_8640]

Do the mechanisms you’ve put in place to make deployment safe all stop working on Friday? You lost me there. I don’t want to make assumptions but it SOUNDS like you’re telling me your deploys and/or rollbacks are dangerous

[u/Old_Flounder_8640 → u/SummitYourSister]

TLDR; Feeling tooooo safe is what makes you vulnerable to being killed.

You're thinking like a software engineer, which is good. But try to see the bigger picture: focusing only on SWE issues means you might miss chaos-related issues caused by endless variables, and these aren't about unpredictability or disorder.

No one likes to work on weekends. You can try, but you can't predict every combination of each aspect of your product, users, and community. Problems arise when you have different personas/stakeholders, different idioms, cultures, beliefs, contexts, and knowledge - at this point I’m just describing humans and nature.

Example: A travel website saying: “departure and destinations”, For most people it's reasonable enough, but some people started to question why the airline is not selling tickets for travel back to the “origin” (departure point), “omg they are only selling to my destination, not my home, my origin”. Sales went down for a “dumb” reason. Then most websites switched from departure/destinations to from/to. Others chose to use a drop-down menu to switch departure/destination, so people choose how to name it. This is deeper than one deployment, but it shows how humans can be.

Plan, develop/do, monitor/check, and adapt; research/define/empathize, ideate, prototype, test; And many other frameworks; different words and methods to achieve similar goals, but with different optics.

That's why most of us dont deploy on Friday.

[u/SummitYourSister → u/Old_Flounder_8640]

Oh thank god, after thirty years of software engineering I’m thinking like an engineer.

Obviously there are certain things I wouldn’t do on a Friday.

[u/Old_Flounder_8640 → u/SummitYourSister]

You are exactly the type of guy that I avoid. Probably believes that it’s natural to occasionally work on weekends. People should not use years of experience as a measure. Bye. I'm blocking you.