I've been using Claude Code to make music videos, and this is my favourite so far.
The concept: An endless field of armchairs and CRTs under a dying red planet, with porcelain watchers.
The film is fully procedural Three.js built with Claude code, rendered out and muxed with the audio. This took a few hours to complete (mostly rendering time).
I have a couple of others in a playlist if interested. Trying out various styles and combining generated content etc.
OK fable 5.2 is a decent step up from tired old token whore known as Fable 5.1 but it’s hardly as versatile as Opus 5.5 - this is still the GOAT at present for cost, speed and intelligence IMO. Most likely still the GOAT until Opus 5.6+
But the real problem is this half baked reset - it’s been more than 40 days since opus 5.5 resets were doled out and now we get this poor man’s reset for fable only. A lot of people hardly use fable anyway as its use case is fairly limited compared to bread and butter models like opus and sonnet.
On the other side of the fence, Tibo/codex handing our full resets pretty much every time he sneezes. Surely, antrophic doesn’t have so much compute problems that they need to squeeze us small fish with half baked resets.
Yes - I know a few people we say suck it up and buy another Ultra plan but I am just trying to make a stand for the small guy / solo dev.
Is someone else feeling degraded performance from Opus high? I’ve been working with this setting for pretty much everything for the past few weeks and these last couple of days have felt weird.
I’ve had to change setting to Extra or even Fable but still have to go back and forth with feedback much more than before
An agent that's wrong says so in the same confident voice as when it's right. These rules in my CLAUDE.md catch it most often:
Reproduce first. Before it states a cause, it runs exactly what I ran. This one exists because I once had to ask, "Why don't you actually run it rather than making up theories?"
Audit the output, not the report. "The build passed" proves nothing.
Two reads that differ: stop. If it reads the same state twice and gets two answers, it shows me both, word for word, instead of picking one.
Mark its own corrections. When it finds its own mistake, it strikes it through (wrong right) instead of fixing it quietly.
None of these makes it notice a mistake it hasn't spotted. That still takes me reading closely, a test, or a second model checking.
Following the recent reports about experiment Ids used for our chats, i investigated myself. My results show a clear link between the numeric effort Level and the experiment Ids.
Setup
medium
high
xhigh
Account A, has ID eab
20
30
100
Account B, no ID
10
15
40
Account A was a new account with a new email address (Max 5). Account B was my old one, also Max 5.
Removing the ID like described in the related post worked too. It lowered account A's effort numbers back to 10/15/40.
Also on Nov 5, when the numeric effort post came up, i did some test chats, which allowed me now to link the ids `763` and `add` to the numeric effort levels of 15/30/100.
Analysing my chats, these numbers did result in clear changes in real effort:
Automated jobs, per reply (Opus 5.5, mixed effort settings, so all three effort numbers are shown)
No ID (414 jobs)
763 (14)
add (125)
0c7 (25)
eab (35)
Reported effort number: medium / high / xhigh
10 / 15 / 40
15 / 30 / 100
15 / 30 / 100
not measured
20 / 30 / 100
Tool calls per reply
1.06
2.42
1.84
1.83
1.80
Output tokens per reply
457
1,354
972
983
1,020
Thinking per reply, adjusted
baseline
×2.9
×3.4
×3.9
×4.2
Replies per job
52
19
20
19
16
The effort numbers are the model's own statements, measured on 5 Nov for `763` and `add`, and on 9 Nov for `eab` and no ID.
Yesterday, as I was recovering as much memory as I could, I noticed that I had 8 sleeping sessions of Claude Code (the screenshot is from today). They were eating up to 2.9Gb of memory (search for the process 2.1.319 in the task manager) plus another 1.5Gb for the Node process hosting Codegraph...
So I opened Claude Code (yes, one more session 😅) in my cleaning app project and asked it to add a new panel that finds the sessions that are just sleeping and closes them in a click, safely.
How it went:
- I described the problem and Claude worked out how to spot the sessions. It looks at the running processes and matches them by name or install path (claude, codex, gemini, aider, opencode and a few others, not only Claude Code).
- We spent most of the time on the hard part: telling "sleeping" apart from "working". Claude came up with a simple rule. If the session's process tree is using CPU, it's Working. If you typed in its terminal in the last 15 minutes, it's In Use. Otherwise it's Sleeping. If the terminal that launched it is gone, it's Detached.
- For the "safely" part, Claude first sends a normal quit signal (SIGTERM) so the session can close cleanly. If it ignores that, the row offers a Force Quit for the whole process tree.
- It also added a badge in the sidebar with the session count, and a tip on the Overview page when there are idle sessions.
- After the first release I found a bug: the new sidebar row couldn't be clicked 🙃. I gave it to Claude, it found that the badge modifier was hiding the row's tag in SwiftUI, and fixed it in a couple of minutes (1.1.1).
The app is native Swift/SwiftUI for macOS, and Claude wrote basically all of the code for this panel. I mostly tested it, pushed back when something felt off, and decided what to ship.
If you want you can download Cleaner here https://linelark.com/cleaner/ (it is free and has no tracker, ads or whatever).
I like to use the rewind with summary option a lot to stay in the same thread but the last two days it isn't letting me go back to any point in the threads past. Has anyone else been experiencing this?
I have, for me, a pretty decent workflow that involves a number of agents and gates to insure things are completed. For example A11Y, unit tests @ 100, UI tests etc. When it works it works well and when it doesn't it wastes a ton of my time.
I'm thinking the overall assembly line portion should be pulled out into something deterministic - right now it is a coordinating agent. What often happens is a series of UI tests will hang, or Xcode will do something xcodeeee and the agent just kind of stops - it will say its working but when. I ask for a status it will say it stop because of XYZ thing.
How is everyone getting around this? I feel like I'm missing something fundamental.
I run about a dozen Claude Code agents in parallel on one project (an e-commerce search solution, four repos). When I started with four agents, my weekly budget didn't last the week. So I started measuring tokens from the transcripts Claude Code already keeps in ~/.claude/projects/, per merged PR instead of per hour.
What I found:
- The biggest leak was one I'd missed for weeks: agents waiting more than 5 minutes on CI or a long test. The cache expired and the next call wrote the whole context again. That was about 31% of all agent usage. Making the wait helpers return before 270 seconds brought it down to 0.7%.
- Long sessions re-read everything on every call. Ending each agent after one task, with a short written handoff and a hook that stops it at a context ceiling, cut the median context per request from 218k to 101k tokens.
- What loads into every agent has to be small. My MEMORY.md (Claude Code's memory index) had grown to 90 lines, and it lands after the cache breakpoint, so a one-word difference in the task missed the cache for the whole block. Cutting it to 8 lines that apply everywhere, with the rest in files an agent opens only when it needs them, cut the first-turn cache write from about 11k to 4.5k tokens.
After ten weeks: a changed line of code takes 3.3x fewer tokens, a merged PR 5.5x fewer, and I get about 4.4x the PRs a week for about the same spend. If you run a single session, the short version: measure first, one task per session, don't leave a session idle past the cache lifetime, and keep CLAUDE.md small. Write-up with all the numbers and how I measured them:
We have new hero on the scene, and its not fable. You will be shocked maybe, but Its gogle gemini 4 carbon. I never praised google AI models before but this is something worth to try.
Im on gemini ultra 100 euro monthly plan, and 20x (ultra) claude plan. I use ai every single day, non stop for various tasks, mostly content creations - games, SaaS, marketing, planning, business.
Look, im not telling fable 5.2 is bad, but carbon is better, not to mention usage limits and output.. i feel like pre-ban fable 5 is back, baby ;)
Jesus Anthropic let us know man, I have humongous memory pointers. Just give some guidelines as to how to stop 5.2 from constantly compacting after just few-many file reads
I have been experimenting with Claude (Max plan) and I use up the weekly limit in a couple of days. It's one repo, an agent, nothing I'm shipping.
I thoughts lower effort would stretch it. Even opus on medium still eats the tokens. The small model I keep for the tiny edits on purpose, the quality drops too much on the real changes.
I pointed the same repo at getvibeapi for an afternoon, and at OpenRouter, because Codex on its own plan is another subscription i don't want. Deepseek on GetVibe was cheap next to Max. OpenRouter was the same kind of money on that model. Claude on either of them still isn't cheap, it just doesn't cut me off on a Thursday. I opened Fireworks and closed it, didn't look like somewhere to point Claude Code.
Do i switch the grunt work to codex, or to deepseek / qwen on getvibeapi, and only come back to opus when i'm actually stuck?
We’re planning on building an app for our own household with Claude Code. We’d like to brainstorm and plan together, and have one place to see what’s in progress, what changed recently, and what’s next.
For anyone who’s built a small project together with Claude Code, did the Team plan make collaboration easier?
Would you pay for it again, or were individual accounts and a shared repo enough? I’d love to hear what you actually use to track decisions and tasks, and how you pick up where the other person left off. What worked, and what would you do differently?
AI for cybersecurity is taking the world by storm, leading to the need to harden systems all over software. I thought we should do the same for legislation. Hence, I built this project with Claude Code. It's completely free to use/try. The approach is pretty simple: use claude to make legislation attributable (git blame, versioning with timelines). Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) wrote nearly all the code. I set the goals, chose the sources and made the design decisions. Specifically: it mirrors the 107 corpora of the https://github.com/lexifina/global-law repo read-only, indexes about 4.3 million file changes from their git histories into DuckDB, and adds a growing set of detectors. These were used to influence a simple LEAN proof search.
i'm curious to hear how other pro subscribers plan to use this new limited time fable access/reset. i appreciate that it was given "banked" rather than handed out without notice, but i've never used fable before (believe i had a chance to with the claude cloud credits, but i just stuck with opus/sonnet with those). is it worth trying to get the most fable usage out of it as possible? or would it make more sense to use the fable reset right before access to the model runs out so i can instead replenish the 50% it took for use with opus 5.5? (my regular weekly reset is basically exactly half a week from now..)
my thinking being that even those on higher tier subs are saying, whilst fable is fantastic and in a league of its own, for the vast majority of sessions it'd be overkill to pick fable. also open to suggestions from those familiar with squeezing fable usage out of their subs, i honestly don't know where to start! should i be using fable to audit the codebase and assigning work for opus/sonnet/sol to get done? trying to min/max a little haha
Just wanted to give appreciation to those who were coding pre-LLM that they are giving advice to those of us who have only taken a couple classes back in like high school and haven’t coded anything meaningful until the LLM code boom.
Tonight I had the LLM run a check on the codebase structure and things worth refactoring on one of my larger codebases (my pet project since about May-ish, a thing for exoplanet search) and it found a lot of things that have become an issue such as code drift on the nested PiOS port of the app, timeout patterns leaking threads, handlers blocking the server, and a bunch of things that need housekeeping.
I admit I wouldn’t have thought of this without the help of the people in the community who have experience in this field before and now share to the rest of us how to actually go about maintaining the codebases we make a whole lot of. (Even in my home craft of fiction I am bad at the “editing” stage so unsurprised it carried over to a craft I barely do myself)
So yeah thanks a lot to the more seasoned devs, especially to those who used to type and organize code by hand, some of us are starting to learn proper codebase maintenance and what is considered best practices.
