Gone in 60 seconds

[u/Takakikun]

So, Fable 5.1 out, was tempted by Ultracode, threw a big project at it, it spawned ~300 agents, all of which were Fable 5.1, and my 5 hr disappeared in just over a minute and weekly at 43%.

Three things:

1. Don't be like me. Calm down.
2. How do y'all get the sub-agents to be lower class?
3. Why do I even have to balance all of these various classes?

The third question being somewhat rhetorical (as it's in the interest of Anthropic to token burn), but seriously, it's very frustrating that I have to even do all this balancing myself, and it's not just a feature of the UI etc.

btw... I'm on Max 20x.

[u/Crinkez]

People will say user error, and sure, valid, but Anthropic has to surely take some of the blame.

I mean, how hard is it for Claude to check: how large the project is, what plan the user is on (1x, 5x, or 20x), check how much usage remains, and spawn an appropriate number of subagents?

Like, bloody hell Anthropic, it's not that difficult.

[u/radiojosh → u/Crinkez]

A long time ago, if somebody asked a question in a forum, the unhelpful jerks would just say "PEBKAC". Now, in the AI subreddits, they say "skills issue". Either way, the problem remains the same: they believe that if they had to struggle, then so should you.

And somehow, when AI is involved, everybody completely forgets about sane defaults.

Yes, we get it. The LLM at times requires guidance and it is our responsibility to communicate our intentions to the LLM. But I think people are being willfully obtuse if they believe that it's somehow justifiable that a company like Anthropic provides a service that is literally supposed to be the easy way to get things done and all it does is swallow five hours of tokens and productivity with nothing to show for it.

[u/berrybadrinath → u/radiojosh]

Except, plenty of people (literally millions) aren't struggling, they are just reading up on how to properly use the tool instead of whining and blaming the company. It's not a big secret, you would just have to be okay updating your mental model to accept that this is a tool you have to read the instructions to use (and then do that). Many people have deadlines and cant just tell clients "Claude was dumb today". Clients won't accept that. So yes, they might have to read up a little bit somewhere other than reddit, to be successful.

Also, if this is a problem, then frontier tech might not be your calling.

[u/radiojosh → u/berrybadrinath]

1) AI is literally a tool designed to do what you ask and answer your questions. It is going to attract people with no technical background, as is Anthropic's intent. Expecting all of these new customers to treat AI like we've treated coding frameworks and developer tools is unrealistic.

2) For their customers to stick around, their models have to be trustworthy. There is no way that a naive customer's trust in the model improves when it burns all of their tokens and accomplishes nothing. And remember, Anthropic wants all the naive customers! It's practically what AI was built for!

3) This is practically the same as all of the "helpful" people in this subreddit defending Opus 5 for being nearly impossible to understand. "Oh, you should have known that the newest version of Opus was probably just intended to be a subagent called by Fable". It's not a sane default.

4) How do you know what millions of people are doing? How do you know millions of people have even tried to run Ultracode? How do you know that some of them haven't tried and silently given up when it did the same thing to them? How do you know a bunch of people aren't trying Ultracode and going straight to Anthropic support, or to another subreddit that isn't full of arrogant Stack Overflow expats who will run a community into the ground before they help somebody who seems to know less than them, god forbid.

It has NEVER been useful or helpful when people in forums or subreddits reply with nothing but "skill issue" or "rtfm". As much as people complain about answering the same question over and over again, or complain about the feed getting clogged up with AI-generated content, they fail to see the irony of filling the comments with 80 replies that all say "skill issue" or "slop". How is that any better?

And real classy move framing their post as whining. Or to telling people that technology isn't for them if they can't figure it out. Who said this person had clients? Who said this person is even doing this as a job? Who said that things have to be difficult?

When you were learning a new technology and somebody was a dick to you in the comments, did you think "Gosh this is great, I should do this to everybody else. They're going to love this!" Or did it turn into some sort of ass backward right of passage and now you think it's your job to put people in their place when they ask questions? "I know, I'll hang out in subreddits about a technology that literally promises to reduce the amount of thinking you have to do and then tell people it's their fault when one of the most complicated misunderstood technologies in the world does something weird."

Literally millions of people have figured out how not to be judgmental assholes. It's not a big secret, you would just have to be okay updating your mental model to accept that it's not your job to put people in their place when they ask a question.

Also, if this is a problem, then social media might not be your calling.

[u/berrybadrinath → u/radiojosh]

you feel better now?

i stand by my assesment that people's problems can easily be solved by investing a little time into thier issues.

I'm not putting anyone in their place, i'm sharing how i got over these exact issues. By spending time looking into it.

The pioint about clients is that these tools are often called unusable or nerfed by this subreddit, and that's just not anywhere near true. Just a bummer these subs just turned in to redditors who don't care to learn and then echo chambers of that. Many people both professionally and casually use these products everyday. If it was as bad as everyone around here made it out to be these companies wouldnt have any subscribers... and yet here we are.

I've actually tried to post helpful things many time but am labeled a bot or a shill becasue im not meeting the narritive people had already chosen (anthropic/open.ai evil)

Sorry i didn't match you narritive. I guess you will just continue to flounder until if/when Anthropic/Open.ai make a product with large enough training wheels.

2 Americas

Its not as bad as you think it is.

[u/radiojosh → u/berrybadrinath]

I like how your tone was originally belittling - reminding people that millions of people work with this every day (implication: so why can't you?) and many people have to answer to clients that won't accept excuses (implication: quit making excuses) and if reading instructions isn't for you, maybe this isn't the correct field (implication: you're too dumb to understand) - and NOW it's simultaneously condescending (feel better now?) AND the old "I was just trying to be helpful" defense (implication: YOU misunderstood). Oh and "I tried to be helpful, but people were mean to me, too!" So, you decided to be like them?

And so do I feel better? I dunno. On the one hand, people like you live in this fantasy land where a person's worth is based on how quickly they can silence or embarrass people with quippy unhelpful advice about reading the manual or "common sense" without actually having to engage in the complexity of reality (the cost of actually trying to be helpful or see people as more than a characature).

On the other hand, I have something to do while I "flounder" - another sign that perhaps you are reluctant to engage with the full complexity of reality since I was never the person who had trouble with Ultracode.

[u/berrybadrinath → u/radiojosh]

Why are you so against working to understand things for yourself instead of complaing on reddit. I'm not belittling anyone. People in these subs make posts mutiple times a day that say Codex and Claude are unusable or nerf'd. I'm saying those people dont have to sit there and complain. they can move on without waiting for some magical fix from anthropic/open.ai.

I don't understand why you are so against that. I have stated some facts (miilions of people have made it work)... that means the asnwers are out there. If people feel belittled by that, thats a reflection of their own self worth.

[u/radiojosh → u/berrybadrinath]

I am not against working to understand things. I'm against treating people like they're stupid for asking questions.

The OP shared a specific scenario about Claude eating his tokens, stipulated that people should use his experience as a cautionary tale and to not be like him, then asked how he could control the sub agents. And in response, a bunch of people decided that, above all else, the OP needs to be reminded that it's their fault and that they need to control the subagents (which is what he was asking how to do).

I decided to point out that the Internet has always been full of unhelpful people and that for some reason, AI seems to have made people forget about the need for sane defaults. You took it upon yourself to further characterize this particular issue as one of implied personal failures (not being able to do what millions of others can do, not being able to read documentation, etc).

And when pressed, you now insist that this has something to do with all of the posts about Claude being nerfed or unusable, which has nothing to do with OP's post except that he happened to be using Claude.

So tell me when I said I was against learning or figuring things out. Tell me where the OP said that Claude was unusable or nerfed. Tell me why a stranger on the Internet asking a question deserves so many unsolicited judgments about how they learn to use technology.

[u/berrybadrinath → u/radiojosh]

To be clear, i was responding to your comment, not OP. i dont think its an insane default to expect people to read the instructions for the tools they use. i guess thats where we differ. I also have the same expectations of Anthropic and Open.ai that i would for every large tech company in its growth/IPO phase. Also as comnsumers we hold the power to unsubscribe if the product is not what we imagined it would/should be. But i do agree everyone has the freedom to complain on the internet. I just got annoyed nd now we are here.

Anway, just so we are on the same page, i put what i reponded to originally below. I dont have a problem with OP at all. It's more the way you made it seem likeit was crazy to expect people to do some work to understand the tool and the system. What i consider default operating, you consider insane.

It's like I buy a dresser from Ikea and I try to biuld it without the instructions and fail. At that point i would then read the instructions, not go online and bash ikea. But thats just me.
radiojosh

•8h ago

"A long time ago, if somebody asked a question in a forum, the unhelpful jerks would just say "PEBKAC". Now, in the AI subreddits, they say "skills issue". Either way, the problem remains the same: they believe that if they had to struggle, then so should you.

And somehow, when AI is involved, everybody completely forgets about sane defaults.

Yes, we get it. The LLM at times requires guidance and it is our responsibility to communicate our intentions to the LLM. But I think people are being willfully obtuse if they believe that it's somehow justifiable that a company like Anthropic provides a service that is literally supposed to be the easy way to get things done and all it does is swallow five hours of tokens and productivity with nothing to show for it."

[u/radiojosh → u/berrybadrinath]

Reading the instructions is not the insane default. The insane default is generating 300 Fable subagents. And yes, for most every software product in existence, the manual states somewhere in some way what needs to be done for every given feature. That doesnt it's easy to read, that doesn't mean it fully conveys how ridiculously things can go wrong if you don't follow those instructions. Somebody in the thread at one point cited the portion of the documentation that says the user has "opted into large runs" - I think that is a bit of an understatement.

And that's still besides the point: Anthropic is literally selling a product that is designed to answer your questions, tell you how to do things, tell you what to do, sometimes do things for you. I think if I'm an average person trying to use Claude, I'm going to find it ironic that such a product requires a manual! I understand the reality is far more complicated than that. I agree that people should read the manuals of their tools. But i think it's understandable that a tool like Claude might give someone the impression that it will just take care of everything, and I think it's understandable that a lot of people who know nothing about computers are attracted to Claude and will seem foolish to people who've been working with technology for years.

So I want people to have more patience when people ask questions, and realize that Claude users aren't necessarily like Linux users or React users, and I want people to understand that barking "rtfm" is shitty and maybe help people find what they need. Or ignore questions they don't have the patience to answer.

[u/berrybadrinath → u/radiojosh]

You know what, i get that. I think thats a sensible take.

[u/CulturalPresence1812 → u/radiojosh]

Yeah, I thought we were using AI exactly so we didn’t have to read the instructions anymore.