Claude Fable Pt 2

Today’s issue: React Native breaks a world record, CSS developers get their revenge, and that time I got fat-shamed in 3rd grade.

Welcome to #496.

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Claude Fable Pt 2

On Friday the U.S. government issued an “export control directive” to Anthropic forcing them to suspend access to foreign nationals, resulting in the model being pulled.

One can only assume Dario has a masochism kink, because after months of begging the government to regulate AI, he finally got what he asked for.

Here’s what happened:

Shortly after the model was released, security researchers were able to jailbreak the model and get around the safety classifiers. This prompted tech leaders, including Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy, to raise concerns to the Trump administration that “freed” Fable posed a real security risk. Anthropic was either unable or unwilling to patch these issues, so they got hit with the ECD.

What happens next?

It seems unlikely that Fable will be back on the market anytime soon given Anthropic’s contentious relationship with the government. But the real question moving forward is whether safeguards that limit model capabilities are actually effective.

Because of the way LLMs are designed, any prompt that can simultaneously activate reasoning and reframe malicious intent as a valid set of instructions can bypass safety constraints. This probably means the end of the unregulated frontier. What regulation will look like and how it will impact release cycles is a topic for another day.

Bottom Line: Between getting a bunch of marketing hype for his IPO without having to pay Fable’s inference costs and getting pegged by the government the sweet relief of regulation, it’s been a solid week for big D.

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The fastest mobile build is the one you never run

Have you ever changed a single line of JavaScript and watched your CI spin up a fresh iOS build, burn through a bunch of macOS runner minutes, and hand you back a binary whose native layer is byte-for-byte identical to the last one?

If so, you’re in luck. The Expo team published an in-depth write-up on how EAS Workflows skips the full build and repacks the previous binary with the new JavaScript on top. They also compare it to other CI/CD options like GitHub Actions, Codemagic, and Bitrise.

Find out how companies like Infinite Red used EAS Workflows to cut their build times in half.

Read the full breakdown here.

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function capitalize(string) {
  string[0].toUpperCase();
  return string;
}

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1. Sunil Pai wrote about how you should never waste a token. My parents also tried to teach me this lesson, which is how I became known as “the fat kid” in 3rd grade.

2. The team at Polar built an “LLM-safe design system”. Unfortunately, you’re still not safe from your design team adding a 38th variation of light gray.

3. AI shows up in 60% of engineering work, but only 1/5 tasks can be handed off without constant babysitting. Agents still lack context. Join live on June 24 (FREE): 8 levels of context maturity in AI-native engineering and how leading teams level up. [sponsored]

4. The team at Vercel Labs built a generative UI framework that turns JSON into rendered components.

5. Mike McQuaid released version 6 of Homebrew, which features improved performance, better security with tap trust, and support for macOS 27. The post does not mention whether or not the Homebros ever learned how to invert binary search trees on a whiteboard.

6. Hiroki Osame built mac-ocr, a CLI built on Apple’s Vision framework that lets you run OCR workloads locally.

7. Approximately 88% of organizations have introduced AI, but only 31% are scaling it effectively - and context is the missing piece. See how Slack connects conversations, data, and systems of record into a unified AI platform that actually acts. [sponsored]

8. The CSS god Adam Argyle created a runtime state library for CSS called a-prop-for-that. Is making a js-in-css library revenge for all the years of css-in-js?

9. The OXC team added support for the React Compiler in version 1.7.

10. Take your application from development to production with clerk deploy, now available in the Clerk CLI. [sponsored]

11. Robert DeLuca built “smart ignore regions” into Vizzly, which lets you avoid false positives from content changing in your app when doing visual regression testing.

12. React Native just released version 0.86, which features DevTools improvements, edge-to-edge support, and a new Guinness world record for most releases before 1.0.

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function capitalize(string) {
  string[0].toUpperCase();
  return string;
}

When we call toUpperCase, we’re assuming that we’re modifying the string that was passed into the function. But strings are primitive values, which means they’re immutable and can’t be modified once they’ve been created.

Instead of trying to modify the string directly, we need to return a new string after capitalizing the first character.

function capitalize([firstLetter, ...restOfWord]) {
  return firstLetter.toUpperCase() + restOfWord.join("");
}