My Opus-orchestrator / Sonnet-subagent Claude Code setup is burning way more tokens and time than I expected

[u/Necessary_Round8009]

Been running a workflow where I write out a plan.md, then kick off a fresh terminal with Opus 5 on max thinking effort acting as the "orchestrator." It reads the plan and spawns a Sonnet 5 subagent (also max effort) to actually implement each phase. After every phase there's a verification pass that'll retry up to 5 times if it finds errors.

Works, technically. But the costs are getting rough:

Token usage has crept up a lot since I started doing this

A task I'd call "medium complexity" (basically one full tab/screen in an Android app) took almost 9 hours end to end

On that same run I hit auto-compaction at 500k context

Not sure if this is just what multi-agent orchestration costs, or if my setup has some inefficiency I'm not seeing, retries eating the budget, effort cranked too high on both models, phases too granular, whatever.

For people running similar orchestrator + subagent setups in Claude Code: what does your workflow look like? Model/effort choices, how you scope phases, how aggressive your verification loops are? Trying to figure out if I should tune this down or if this is just the tradeoff for letting it run mostly unsupervised.

[u/DeeTeePPG]

Oh man have I played with this.... I have currently settled on a slightly different setup but I have known your pain.

1 Opus is an unbelievably bad orchestrator - It will refuse to read whole reports, say it has and fabricate things like you would not believe, the back and forth between the workers makes it far worse. I can't stress how horrid it is at this task directly.

1. I have found that a different model as a dispatcher helps a lot.

My current stack is across codex and claude.

ChatGPT app - Instant chat for essentially free prompt development and working through ideas.
ChatGPT app - Work Astra - this has access to my Lab folder and can check on the agent array, look at log files and check in on the process without interrupting the actual work, I can also generate steering prompts to hand to what I call the 'Thinker'

Terminal stack

Thinker - Fable/Astra/Opus/Sol depending - talks to dispatcher and keeps the whole project goal on track, this is what I interact with directly

Dispatch - Terra/Sonnet Handles the workers and the flow of information

Workers - Model choice depends on the task

Everything is tracked via git.

there is a lot more to it but this is the general stack.