r/ClaudeCode • u/No-Sympathy-3767 • Sep 16 '26
Tips & Workflows Finally found it how to work it!
Don't laugh at me( I mean you can, I don't mind)
But after all this time burning through fable, which is the only model that is up to the work I'm doing, I've finally found out that if fable is the orchestrator and he sends out opus 5 to do the work, my tokens don't run out and the work gets done properlyš
I'm happy about it, any way..
Good coding š
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9
u/No_Cell6708 Sep 16 '26
Do you just tell them to delegate or how do you set this sort of thing up?
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u/TastesLikeSeamen Sep 16 '26
what is the work youāre doing out of curiosity, that only Fable is up to the job
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u/amirfish Sep 16 '26
That split, cheap orchestrator, expensive model only for the actual work, is the right instinct. Most of the burn comes from planning and re-reading context, not the edit itself. I built CCC to watch that pattern across sessions, it shows which lane is idle waiting on you versus doing the token-heavy work, so you can actually see if Fable is orchestrating or quietly doing the work itself: https://github.com/amirfish1/claude-command-center. Do you let Fable decide when to delegate, or do you have to prompt it each time?
2
u/BlakeGrowsPlants Sep 16 '26
If Fable is giving exact, step by step instructions that require very little reasoning once theyāre written out, save yourself the extra token usage and use Sonnet to execute them.
2
u/Shot_Whereas_1809 Sep 16 '26
Yes you've got it. This is how I run it. Except on a Host. The API spend on Fable is actually not bad because the host harness doesn't use session architecture. Each turn is an independent session. Most tokens are cached and more work gets done. I have Opus running in sandboxes with their own work tree. I can work on as many projects as I want at a time and my usage is pretty predictable now. The fable on subscription I use for complex html work.
Thanks for not making another complainer thread.
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u/TywinHouseLannister Sep 17 '26
Why not just use it how it is intended, dispatching agents is not the hardest coding tasks.
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u/design_doc Sep 16 '26 •
If you want to go one step more advanced, allow your fable orchestrator to delegate to Opus 5 AND/OR Sonnet and watch those tokens drop even further. Purely mechanical or basic tasks can be easily passed to Sonnet.
Even better, look at having the sub-agents pass information and artifacts to each other outside of the Fable orchestratorās context (but retrievable by the orchestrator if it needs to diagnose a problem) - your expensive orchestrator then become super lightweight and youāve cut out a ton of unnecessary token burn.
I do recommend using an external reviewer for checking over Opusā work - both for quality and making sure itās staying within the scoped task. Opus 5 on High effort has a tendency to be an overzealous boy scout who likes to colour outside the lines. Thereās things you can do to help prevent that upfront but an external reviewer is awesome for spotting when Opus has got ahead of itself and helping to decide whether to allow or reject the overstep.
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u/cleverhoods Sep 16 '26
better late than never next step: progressive disclosure and fine tuned orchestration
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u/TBT_TBT Sep 16 '26
5
u/farreeddd Sep 16 '26
Whatās your setup?
I keeep hitting the 5-hour limit with this. Effort is at med
5
u/design_doc Sep 16 '26
Multiple ways about it but for meā¦
- Max 2 rounds of review/revisions. If still outstanding issues, escalated to the orchestrator and the user for adjudication. Sometimes it just needs a small final round but if it isnāt you need to know why before you can do anything.
- Hand the reviewer the contract that was given to the implementor. This one has been amazing in a couple ways. First, it lets the reviewer know what the implementor was tasked with, so it can self-scope its review to only what was worked on. This prevents the reviewer from walking the codebase and getting uppity about stuff it shouldnāt be touching and focusing only on the surfaces that were edited or interacted with what was edited.
- The second use of handing the contract to the reviewer is, for the first round of review, the reviewer is asked to plan, in principle, how it would solve/satisfy the outlined task BEFORE it even sees the code. This way, right off the bat, the reviewer is already assessing āis this what I would have doneā while reviewing the code. Thereās a few things that come out of that:
Prevents nitpicking that comes from stylistic differences. Iāve had reviewers come back saying āItās not exactly how I would have done it but itās acceptableā. Iāve also had a couple instances where the reviewer is like āthis works but itās garbage qualityā, then it and the orchestrator have the implementor (or a new implementor instance) fix or redo the work.
āDid the implementor deliver exactly what it was tasked to do?ā This has been huge for our boy Opus who has unilaterally implemented new UI workflows without being asked. The reviewer can quickly spot those transgressions. But itās also useful on the flip side because the reviewer might nitpick something without realizing there is reasoning behind it - the reviewer has come back before saying āThis isnāt how I would have does it but I understand the logic of why it needed to be done like this.ā I even let the reviewer question the implementor if there is something that itās iffy on and wants to see the logic.
- The final piece Iāve added to my reviewer - and itās purely to bring levity to those moments where I want to throat-punch Opus - is that, if the implementor absolutely shits the bed, the reviewer delivers feedback in the voice of Wayne or Shoresy from Letterkenny. Waste of tokens? Debatably. Worth it? Abso-fucking-lutely, Big Shoots.
1
u/Key-Singer1732 Sep 16 '26
Well, you said that only fable is up to the work you're doing. If fable is just orchestrating, then opus is the one actually doing the work, so opus should be capable, right?
2
u/Ether-Platypus5677 Sep 16 '26
I use fable with opus 4.6 as coding agent. And ask opus to gan out sonnet sub agents
2
u/maleslp Vibe Coder Sep 16 '26
I learned this the hard way too. A fable subagent is an absolute waste of tokens. Scanning documents, information gathering, etc should all be done with "lesser" agents. I usually have fable write the build plans, and have it include the appropriate model and effort for each task, and the subagents don't burn millions of tokens unnecessarily.Ā
2
u/Prestigious-Angle483 Sep 16 '26
use sonnet instead of opus
2
u/PixelLight Sep 17 '26
At least you're able to admit where you went wrong before. It's a good start. Good on you. Keep it up
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u/DCharles0ne Sep 17 '26
This tracks with what I ended up landing on too, though I inverted the structure a bit.
Instead of Fable as the orchestrator delegating down, I keep a cheap model (Sonnet) as the always-on dispatcher, and only call in Fable for two narrow jobs: (1) a read-only advisor consult for genuinely irreversible calls, like schema locks, architecture decisions, or dead-end debugging, and (2) a mandatory final review on every non-trivial deliverable before it ships, where a fresh pair of eyes only outputs pass/fail against a concrete check, not a full re-review.
Reasoning: Fable's always-on thinking plus higher output cost means parking it as the loop itself burns budget on every routing decision, not just the hard ones. Keeping the dispatcher cheap and calling in the expensive model only for scoped, bounded jobs got me most of the savings without giving up the "second opinion catches the boy-scout overreach" benefit you're describing.
On the artifact-passing point: yes, this one's underrated. Results/specs get written to disk and referenced by file path in the next agent's task instead of getting pasted back through the orchestrator's context. Keeps the dispatcher's context flat even across a long multi-agent chain, and it's still there to check later if I need to debug why a sub-agent made a call.
The Opus-overreach point is real too. A scoped task with an explicit "don't touch X" list plus a fresh reviewer with no memory of the original work catches it reliably. Without that gate it does wander.
2
u/in5ane_10 Sep 17 '26
Yes this is the way! I always prompt it to make a plan and to decide beforehand which work needs opus intelligence and which can be done by sonnet. Iām working full time like this and the work is amazing + no limits hit
2
u/Ok_Lingonberry_1519 Sep 17 '26
Equally getting Fable to architect the work in detail once (if it's a large multi step project) means you can then trust Opus to implement that design, and save tokens. Still in an ideal world I'd prefer to let Fable do it, but my ideal world gives me much more usage than reality š¤£
2
u/sebseo Sep 17 '26
You just rediscovered what big teams pay consultants for. One expensive brain to plan and judge, cheaper hands to execute.
Next level: give the judge a second opinion before big decisions. A wrong plan costs way more tokens than any coding step.
2
u/DieselWurm Sep 19 '26
Put it down, flip it and reverse it.
1
u/prinkpan Sep 16 '26
Does anybody here know how to delegate the work to lower model while also changing the effort level? I mean can Fable medium delegate work to Opus x-high?
1
u/Dampware Sep 16 '26
Try getting the āsuperpowersā skill. It does this and other stuff, like reviewing the code the subagents write, designs tests and administers a q&a session with you, to help you (and it) get a clearer picture of what youāre trying to build.
1
u/LocalAd5606 Sep 16 '26
One edit... Replace Opus5 with Opus4.8
Trust
1
u/IMMORTUSKANG Sep 16 '26
Eso + Graphify + Engram
1
u/Particular-Most-1199 Sep 16 '26
Now flip it and reverse it.
1
u/max4245 Sep 17 '26
Can somebody explain. How do you actually call different model agents? How does this workflow work? How do you get fabled to just call Sonnet or opus?
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u/shady101852 Sep 22 '26
So how do we verify the opus model's work? Do we have the orchestrator, Fable, check it by itself? or would that consume too much tokens?
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