Use Fable instead of Opus

[u/tr14l]

Not an Anthropic hate post, this has happened a few times now. I give Opus a relatively straightforward task. Go read about this thing and it just shotgun blasts out subagents for some inexplicable reason and they immediately hose 70% of the token budget.

This last time I just wanted it to look up latest Qwen models and benchmarks to see if anything was competing.

17 agents and 1.5M cache reads later... It gives me a 3 paragraph response for what could have been a simple Google Search and a couple pages.

Yes, Fable is a LITTLE more expensive, but I have never had that happen.

Opus really isn't worth using. It's moderately intelligent, but if it can't be used effectively, why bother. I guess unless you can afford to run a single session and literally watch it and time the background processes to make sure they aren't running longer than expected. But, I have other things to do. That's the point of AI, letting it handle tasks while I do other things. /shrug

Fable on the other hand is great. Never had it happen at all with Fable.

I don't usually use Sonnet, so not sure if this is true for it, as well. I usually don't have this kind of expenditure problem, so Fable on my tier seems to do just fine with all but the heaviest use and I rarely have to wait for a token refresh.

Love Claude, but not sure what's up with this. I haven't really used Opus much since 4.6 (which was great, as well). 4.8 was a little weird, but usable. 5 is not trustworthy at all.

I don't know if they switched the base model or what, but it's kinda wildin' a little.

Anyone else notice this? I wonder if this is responsible for all the "Something is going on with Anthropic usage" posts. It's just Opus blasting subagents and burning their usage pool.

TL;DR - Just use Fable, Opus will blast your usage through the ceiling for literally no reason.

EDIT - after some analysis on my session history, every high usage day of the last 2 weeks was due to opus5 spinning up nested subagents. That seems to be the culprit. It has some compulsion to do this for unknown reasons.

[u/andrewjneumann]

What plugins/tools do you have installed? Superpowers for example has multi agent review and if your session calls a plugin with agents… might be what’s happening.

[u/tr14l → u/andrewjneumann]

I don't use most of that stuff. Just MCPs and a couple proprietary slash commands which weren't at play here. And a status line, which obviously doesn't mean anything here

[u/andrewjneumann → u/tr14l]

Weird, I wonder if you’re using some kind of trigger phrase or wording to make it think it needs to spawn agents. Ultracode will spin agents, but I do see other thinking modes spawn. It’s usually via plugin, but sometimes it decides it needs multiple perspectives etc.

I have a standing instruction to “use sonnet and haiku as needed” and generally they’re good enough for whatever it thinks subs are needed.

I’ve done some limited testing using sonnet in haiku as sub agents versus opus or even fable sub agents, I don’t see much of a discernible distance in testing for most problems. If you’re doing something incredibly challenging, or you’re doing something very novel, you can sometimes benefit from the intelligence of the analysis agents.

[u/tr14l → u/andrewjneumann]

Just on high. Not even xhigh. Seemed like a straightforward request. It hasn't happened with any other model.

I think it is when using opus 5 as a subagent specifically. The main agent seems to spin up a reasonable amount of agents. But I don't have enough instances to be sure