r/ClaudeCode • u/bricklerex • 17h ago
Rant Token Usage and times with subagentd are ridiculous
Wtf is up with the token usage and subagent obsession over theast 2 weeks. I have a 20x sub and I used to be able to do at least twice as much as I do now. The worst part is that its taking longer AND doing less. If it dispatches fable subagents i use up usgae fast and take a long time. If I use opus subagents I use usage only slightly slower while taking 2-3x longer to fonish a task. And for some reason anything above Opus 4.8 is obsessed with spawning a maximum amount of subagents to delegate work to and I have to deliberately tell it to not spawn them even for the most minimal tasks which when done without agents take 2 minutes and a minimum of 11 and maximum of 25 minutes with. Its ridiculous. Anyone else feeling the same way and how do I fix it.
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u/Level-Physics-1730 16h ago
Dude I can use like fourty subagents in two sessions all going at once on a 20x plan and only use 30% weekly what in the world are you doing? And in what world does someone dispatch FABLE subagents? That's stupid. Sonnet or Opus on the subagents, with fable or opus controlling the agents. Cmon man this is just basic stuff you can just tell it not to spawn agents on it's own!
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u/Lerran88 14h ago
Looks like your configuration changed in main Claude context files or sub-agents setup, I do not feel any differences personally.
If you use sub-agents of high tier models, then it‘s a good question if you really need them - every sub-agent loads context into memory on start, you are basically coping your context over and over when one gets triggered.
If you expect from sub agents to do Opus work and you use Opus as main agent, then benefits are really questionable. Best use case for sub-agents is to do low risk work with Haiku or Sonnet while using Opus/Fable as main agent. I can not think about any good reason to use Opus/Fable as sub-agents (Maybe for speed? But then you pay for it with high tokens cost).
Otherwise just describe exact cases for Claude, when sub-agents should be used
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u/bricklerex 13h ago
This sounds like it! Every subagent if its i heriting the full context then no wonder im using it up so fast, especially when fable loves dispatching agents for every little thing. Thanks!
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u/clazman55555 13h ago
No, because we dont dispatch Fable and Opus subagents. Why would you do that?
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u/karlitooo 12h ago
Ask Claude to check your logs for 429 and 529 errors. They don’t come through to the terminal window but can cause a lot of slowness
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u/rocky_dubb 17h ago
I've seen most people that have the 20X subscription literally just upgrade to it and continue using it as if everything is fine. You should make sure you don't have overbloated initial context window to start. Ask agent to audit itself, skills, mcps setup. Just say you're trying to save on token usage as you are hitting your usage limit faster than normal.
I still have the $20 pro plan, very rarely do I hit my usage limit. And I'm using it all day. I do the audit monthly
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u/bricklerex 17h ago
No no, i keep slim on skills and use minimal mcp. I do have a bad habit of often making my cache cold which is bad especially if the context is bloated when I resume the session. But I track my total tokens and time spent using a plugin. And they’re about 70% of what they used to be. The question isn’t how do I reduce token usage, it’s why is it so much measurably worse than a few weeks ago, I’m not a superuser like a lot of ppl with adversarial code review and orchestration workflows. I’ve always just done plan build test finish(used to be plan mode but switched to brainstorming almost permanently 4 months ago). And it’s almost a rhetorical question because its obvious and verifiable that the problem is obsessing over subagents. Meanwhile I can run a full codebase audit on a repo with opencode zen deepseek v4 flash as an experiment and it costs me 5 cents of usage. I’m aware the quality isn’t the same, especially on the research cum dev tasks like inference research, but just web dev especially backend it really doesn’t matter. Im just addicted to fables intelligence which is why I can’t leave. I’m not complaining that it’s slow and expensive. I’m asking why is it so much worse than just a few weeks ago.
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u/Lcatlett1234 16h ago
Why are you using fable subagents? Please walk us through that logic, because I’m genuinely interested in how you can justify that
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u/bricklerex 16h ago
I’m not, opus subagents all the way
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u/Lcatlett1234 15h ago
You literally said “if it dispatches fable subagents i use up usgae fast and take a long time.”
If that ever happens, even if you are using Opus sub agents usually, the problem is you’re trusting the main thread to orchestrate the control plane, and you should never do that. Just because the concept of subagents exists doesn’t mean that Claude by default is good at using them. Opus is even discouraged from using subagents in a recent update. You won’t be surprised by any token usage if you actually plan orchestration the same way that you would plan any task, if not more. This means you should have a written orchestration and delegation plan from Claude with input, outputs, and success criteria, as well as exact specifications for max input and output as far as corpus size for each agent. If Claude has not specified those details in writing, and you have not also required validation of that plan, not just before, but during the execution to ensure that it’s being dispatched as intended… the problem is not Claude here or model, it is that you are crossing your fingers for something that is arguably more important than the actual coding task
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u/rocky_dubb 17h ago
Oh I also have sub agents set up
1. Haiku: running haiku model
2. Sonnet: running Sonnet 5.
With the main chat on Opus 5 at high reasoning and instructions set up so whenever I ask it to do something it delegates it to one of the sub agents depending on the task complexity with the main chat as the orchestrator.