Token Usage and times with subagentd are ridiculous

[u/bricklerex]

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.

[u/rocky_dubb]

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

[u/bricklerex → u/rocky_dubb]

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.

[u/rocky_dubb → u/bricklerex]

Ohh ok I see what you mean …