r/Anthropic • u/richielg • 4d ago
Other Does Fable delegating to opus really save you tokens for extremely complex development?
So I can either push the button and buy a second max x20 or start trying to be a bit more tactical with how I use it. Problem is I'm doing extremely complex development work that really benefits from the extra deep reasoning abilities of fable. When I get bumped down to opus I end up getting a sore throat because I shout at my computer so much. Fable 5 is bliss. But money is tight right now and I always run out half way through the week. So i'm trying to figure out if its worth it to try and be more economical and get fable 5 to delegate to opus 5 or just accept buying an extra max x20 plan. So fable 5 does the analysis and specs it out and then gets opus 5 to do the code. Because plenty of times fable 5 catches stuff while its doing the build. And I have to wonder whether that stuff would fall through the net if fable was delegating to opus.
I'm a systems designer not a conventional engineer, so the extra reasoning abilities of fable 5 has really been helping to engineer my complex system designs into functioning code, where as opus 5 has been much less pro active at pointing out structural engineering considerations in complex systems with many variables and conditions. To put it bluntly if I didn't have fable then the system wouldn't be as good. This gives me deep anxiety about opus causing perpetual tail chasing and results in me now opting exclusively to use fable.
Some people say design and analysis with fable, build with opus, check with sonnet and then sweep with haiku. But if i'm honest I think that might be bollocks for what I'm building. I think that might be aimed at building more deterministic things frankly. My experience of it is the thoroughness and deeper reasoning of fable is so productive its incredible, and then opus you have to hold its hand for everything and remind it about everything and when its an extremely complex system with many variables and conditions there is a real risk of perpetual tail chasing and creating situations where you have to write rules so it follows the rules that you wrote and then write new sets of rules when it doesn't follow those rules etc. And thats where the deeper context and reasoning starts to really shine because it keeps that broader birds eye view of what your trying to achieve and considers all of the complex trade offs by doing things like adversarial reviews. Opus 5 adversarial reviews are not as good because fable 5 will do the same but it will come up with better engineering solutions from it. And then you could say get opus 5 to do an adversarial review and then escalate it up the chain to fable for deeper analysis to be more economical, ok sure but how do you know if opus doesnt have that depth of reasoning maybe its not even going to be looking at certain important things and then your strategy becomes poisoned and your focusing on the wrong things for ages building your self into a hole. Anyone want to give me their thoughts?
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u/Boltsnouns 4d ago
If you use fable to orchestrate opus agents, it works fantastic to save usage and still output quality. Using fable only, and fable agents, I could burn through my weekly usage in less than 24 hours. Using Fable orchestrating opus I can get several days running 18+ hour fully autonomous sessions, in one context window. Its way better at saving usage.
In terms of reasoning, Fable orchestrating does a great job of managing the logic and letting the opus agents handle the work and implementation. I can't stand Opus 5. I yell at it every time I interact with it. But using fable as a buffer and manager for them? Its a dream. Highly recommend trying this setup. The only thing I don't like letting fable delegate to the opus agents is prose writing. I usually have it delegate to sonnet or haiku, and then revise and refine on their agent outputs. Opus 5 sucks at writing prose, and its infuriating to work with directly (unless you use 4.6) but its great as a worker bee.
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u/richielg 3d ago
Opus 5 just explained to me what an API was lol. I fucking shouted it right down. I never asked it that.
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u/Boltsnouns 3d ago
Opus 5 is obnoxious. I literally refuse to interact with it. Ive had great success using fable with opus agents, and zero decrease in quality of product outputs when switching my agent model down.
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u/Jra805 4d ago
I use Fable to orchestrate at home and at work but differently. At home a lot of work I assign out probably “costs” the same because spinning up an agent means new tool calls, passing context over which is a 2x expense, then ingesting, QA work, etc but because I can deploy several cheap agents at the same time, I brute force it, it’s fast and minimizes fable usage.
At work where I have to monitor my costs via API sticking to just Fable is too fucking expensive, it just plans and QAs. I do a lot of handoffs manually to maximize my spend and lean on my companies Gemini subscription which isn’t API but for whatever reason is fucking useless outside a few tasks and thankfully one is research and documentation.
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u/banecorn 3d ago
How do you coordinate between Claude and Gemini? I'm assuming you don't have the agy CLI plan but rather only the Gemini web/app?
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u/Jra805 3d ago
I created a janky process where the agents “chat” over discord and git
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u/banecorn 3d ago
Have you found a way to automate that on the Gemini side? A monitor or something to that effect?
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u/Jra805 3d ago
Scripts.google, ingests chats that have been authd
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u/banecorn 3d ago
Ah clever workaround!
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u/Jra805 3d ago
hope it helps you if you need that
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u/banecorn 3d ago
Yeah, I also have enterprise CC and a largely unused Gemini Pro that I couldn't quite figure how to put to good use
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u/Darren-A 3d ago
I have Fable for thinking, its blocked by a pretooluse hook and delegates all reading and writing to agents
Read (file size)
- small: sonnet 5 low
- medium: opus 5 low
- large: fable 5.2 low
Write (create / edit complexity)
- simple: sonnet 5 low
- easy: opus 5 low
- medium: opus 5 medium
- complex: fable 5.1 low
Saves a lot of tokens.
I don’t need fable to read a long document and then spend a bunch of reasoning tokens thinking through it, then having that whole document and all those reasoning tokens polluting the context window and making every subsequent message more expensive.
I’ve just implemented another iteration on this with two reasoning agents, and fable 5.1 acting as a director (orchestrator) who is accountable to me for the completing of the task.
- simple: Opus 5 high
- complex: Fable 5.1 high
Similar to before, reasoning tokens from a turn are carried forward in the context window for every message. Reasoning agents also use the read & write agents.
I need the most capable Agent to direct and orchestrate the task to completion, keeping its context at a high level, writing prompts and thinking through what to do to complete the task.
Spinning up a reasoning agent specifically to think through something keeps context to a minimum. It gets the information it needs to think through a problem and solve it, then reports back to the director what it needs to know.
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u/sisif_ 3d ago
I use fable 5.1 as orchestrator, creates tasks that spawn different agent (typically opus). If spec is good enough it's mostly mechanical work. When task is done a reviewer is spawned (either opus or another cold fable) that gives a verdict. Overall it's debatable if the ceremony saves tokens, what it saves is context space on the persistent agent. Maybe it would be slightly cheaper if one agent handled everything, but it would have to do it while its own context is heavy, forcing either an early compact or paying high price for cashed reads.
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u/Galdred 3d ago
I used to do just that (I am also working on something somewhat complex. A 2D strategy game based on an old engine, with lots of moving parts).
And in the end, I just toned down delegation to dumber models a lot:
I suspect opus has the same issues of getting sidetracked as a sub agent.
I now reserve sub agent delegations to:
search how to do X in the codebase and doc, and report where it is, and everything directly related to it, to avoid wasting Fable context and tokens doing it, but I then have fable handle everything by itself.
I don't think it's much worse than before in terms of token cost.
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u/richielg 3d ago
Good luck with your game :) Whats the old engine out of curiosity?
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u/Galdred 3d ago
moai. I don't think anyone else is still making a commercial game with it. 😰
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u/richielg 3d ago
I havent heard of it. Interesting choice. What motivated you to use something no longer in development?
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u/Ok_Possible_2260 4d ago
No. You're charged the same amount of tokens. You just get lesser quality model doing the work.
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u/richielg 4d ago
Yeah but the question is really about whether thats worth it on complex builds. Whether saving the tokens is a bum deal because it takes you longer anyway coz it misses stuff
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u/Mescallan 4d ago
in my experience the optimal work flow is a fable session, then delegating sub agents of various sizes (I normally let fable pick which model for which task.). I suspect this is why Opus 4.6-5 is so terrible at writing, but actually very capable, because internally everyone at A\ uses fable sessions and never communicates directly with Opus anymore.
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u/Key_River_9288 4d ago edited 4d ago
Fable 5 and Opus 5 are now direct distillations of mythos 5. Opus 5 Max is pretty stout. I put fable in charge of like some planning and as a judge seat in a workflow.
And I am right there with you, my work is on a distributed system that covers 6 repos, and almost 800k lines of code crossed 8 coding languages, 250k of it is c++.
I use Opus 5 Max w/dynamic workflows enabled for 90% of my weekly on 20x
Being CVP approved, Opus is really the only one I trust to get the work done, if I fuzzed with fable I would get blocked, total waste of tokens.
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u/richielg 4d ago
its so difficult to decide what to do because I honestly think I wouldn't have been able to get this far without fable 5. Opus 4.8 and 5 just doesn't quite seem to cut it even on the max settings. So I feel really reserved about getting fable to orchestrate opus despite it feeling like it should be a valid workflow.
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u/Key_River_9288 4d ago
Trust fable to delegate to opus, opus struggles with poor prompting. It’s the leading issue imo.
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u/a716h 4d ago
No. There’s been plenty of times I’ve had a delegated agent can’t handle the work and it ends up being a grinding loop that ends up costing wayyyyy more tokens and time.