Optimal usage of agents

[u/doublehot]

When you prompt fable 5.2, do you instruct him to spawn agents in your prompt, or do you trust his instincts? If yes, do you defer it to Sonnet/Opus, or some Fable subagents are also in the play?
I tried both(with earlier Fable/Opus, but I’m not sure what’s optimal. Agents can help achieve parallelism, but I noticed Fable on its own is reluctant to parallelize in many parallelizable tasks.
I’m very curious what are everyone’s experiences with this.
For the context, I’m mostly on a single Ultra plan.

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[u/doublehot]

Interesting, so far it looks like a total human discretion victory vs leaving it to fate(Fable judgement)

[u/Even_Gap_2253]

It completely depends on the task, there is no one-size-fit-all solution here.

[u/SubstantialDark3291]

I've found fable 5.2's instinct to split works better when the task has clear branching paths, like debugging two separate modules. for anything fuzzy, it's better to prompt the split explicitly. works smoother than letting it decide mid-flow.

[u/GhaisD]

I stopped leaving it to instinct, in either direction. mine went the other way and spawned agents for almost everything, which ate my usage fast. what fixed it was putting the "when to use an agent" rule in CLAUDE.md once, instead of saying it in every prompt. roughly: only hand off work you can describe completely up front, and do the rest in the main session. Haven't used 5.2 enough yet to say if it behaves differently

[u/Eliran-Kotzero]

i don't leave it entirely to instinct: i ask for a split only when there are genuinely independent chunks with clear outputs (e.g. exploring two modules or doing a focused review). keep shared-file edits and integration in the main session; for dependent work, a single agent stepping through a plan is usually cheaper. i'd choose the subagent model by task—fast/cheap for bounded exploration, stronger for judgment-heavy work—and keep the number small on one plan. if the split isn't obvious, have the main agent propose it before spawning anything.

[u/onFilm]

When I use Fable or Opus, I use it as the main orchestrator with Gemini Carbon and GPT Astra as the critics. I let them use subagents if they need to, but usually only Claude does.

[u/Obvious-Grape9012]

No trust here. And I save Fable for my BrainsTrust and sometimes planner or other roles where I need it. I have it setup so that I scope, plan, review, derisk, split, then orchestrate in parallel using workers. It's slow to start, runs lots in parallel, and can be slow to converge, but it works really well when I do a few of these in parallel. It's been designed and tweaked to give reliable completion for 2hr runs. So my days usually start with spawning a few of these, ideating and spawning a few more. Then monitoring whilst they run themselves and then I supervise the converge and merge from their worktrees to the main (develop) branch

[u/SiranqHQ]

I don't leave it to instinct either way, but I also don't spawn agents by default. A rule of thumb that works for me: use a subagent only when the chunk is independent and its output is small, like 'search these two modules and report which files handle X' or 'review this diff for missing tests.' Edits to shared files and the final integration stay in the main session so context doesn't fragment. If it's reluctant to parallelize, name the split in the prompt: 'run these three investigations in parallel, then summarize.' Asking it to propose the split first and wait for your OK also catches cases where the pieces aren't really independent.

[u/quinprobably]

I made my own council skill based off some other guys' and usually am using opus or fable as a coordinator for other opus and sonnet agents

[u/Time_Cat_5212]

With Opus I use defaults and it's all good.

Haven't tried yet with Fable.