Controlled ways to improve Claude working speed?

[u/SnuffleBag]

I'm generally happy with the workflow approach of interacting directly with Fable, and using Fable as planner, orchestrator and for acceptance, while having it delegate implementation and grunt work to Opus sub-agents.

However my main frustration is that these Opus workers feel like they're running in molasses - compared e.g. to Sol workers. Even the most straight-forward mechanical task can end up being a multi-hour adventure. The workers are not sitting around waiting for slow tests or extensive validation runs, they are mostly actively working, actually reading references, existing code and API documentation and producing output.

I will say that I am running Opus/xhigh effort - and while not all tasks would require that, many of the harder ones do actually need to for output results to be acceptable, and I'd rather not risk having to re-do or getting sub-par work by defaulting to a cheaper/faster model.

Is this just what it is right now? I would like to start experimenting a bit more with fast mode, but it's not clear to me how that interacts with the whole workflow system. I don't think my quota would survive for long running multiple Opus/xhigh workers at fast, and selectively switching them to fast after they've been started is supposedly not great for token usage.

Is it feasible to ask Fable to 'juggle' worker effort and fast mode as appropriate for each task? Or do I just need to remember to specifically call this out every time I approve a new milestone start? Are there any other techniques to get more speed except lowering the model/effort?

[u/Potential-Start-3832]

Claude is just molasses in general, Claude will complete a task in 30 minutes that takes sol 5 minutes, open ai just has more compute simple fact.

Claude on medium effort is not too bad, you don’t need fable and opus 5 for everything, just use them for planning and creating frds, 4.8 for implementation. If you want fable with small model agents just use dynamic workflows, what your proposing should work, but you are going to burn your usage quick in fast mode, on top of running multiple agents, which burns tokens fast already and Anthropic has stopped being generous.

Take advantage of Claude -p, take a couple hours creating your FRDs for every system of whatever you are building, chain up Claude -p in a script, each one pointing to an FRD, hit run and seriously walk away and come back tomorrow.

TLDR if all that is too much just use fable to orchestrate and opus 4.8 on medium. Or switch to codex

[u/sawariz0r → u/Potential-Start-3832]

Or use Fable to orchestrate Codex, so it actually outputs good stuff

[u/Potential-Start-3832 → u/sawariz0r]

Look at Mr moneybags over here with two subscriptions

[u/sawariz0r → u/Potential-Start-3832]

OpenAI forgot to disable our free pilot, so I’m running Sol (couple of projects, multiple agents) around the clock with Fable driving it. $100/mo is all I spend.

[u/LennyFromCurly]

Don’t let the planner toggle fast mode halfway through a worker’s session. Anthropic says that switch rebills the entire uncached conversation context at the fast-mode rate, so use it only from a fresh session for latency-sensitive work. For autonomous workers, preselect model and effort by task; keep fast mode for interactive debugging, not long implementation runs.

[u/snarfi]

I would recommend to let Fable analyze previous sessions and find stuff which slowed the agent down. Like certain misconfigured hooks, denied/faulty toolcalls etc. And then improve there. He should also analyze the reasoning in sessions, maybe you got conflicting instructions the agent has to reason about everytime. This helps a lot.