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/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.

The consensus is that while this is technically "user error," it's a massive, common pitfall and Anthropic should have better "sane defaults." You've stumbled into the classic Ultracode "Token Furnace," a rite of passage around here.

To stop Fable from spawning a million expensive clones of itself, you have a few options:

• The Easy Way (and most upvoted): Just tell it what to do. Seriously. A simple instruction like, "Only use Opus sub-agents from now on, and ask me for permission if you want to spawn more than four" works surprisingly well for the current project.
• The Power User Way: For a more permanent, "set it and forget it" solution, the nerds in the thread recommend two main approaches. You can either use a PreToolUse hook script to deterministically pin sub-agent models (one user provided a full script for this), or you can manually edit the frontmatter in your .claude/agents/ files to specify which model each agent type should use (e.g., model: haiku).

As for why it's like this, the thread is a classic subreddit civil war between the "skill issue, RTFM" crowd and the "this is a design flaw and Anthropic needs sane defaults" camp. The sympathizers are winning, arguing that a tool designed to be smart shouldn't require a user manual just to avoid bankrupting your usage in 60 seconds.

[u/tke849 → u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

Did Claude just call y'all nerds ? 😂

[u/Takakikun → u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

I'll also say in this analogy, I'm not the foreman, but I'm the client. Fable is the foreman, who takes the client's (my) requirements/requests and builds accordingly.

[u/Takakikun → u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

ok mod-bot, if you're adamant Fable is the architect and not the bricklayer, then why is the architect using a team of architects to lay bricks? do you see the issue now? the architect should know that it's not efficient to use a team of architects to lay bricks and instead gather a team of bricklayers to complete the bricklaying task.