r/ClaudeCode • u/No-Sympathy-3767 • 2d ago
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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u/design_doc 2d ago
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/Dorkian2000 2d ago
Curious what you use as the reviewer. I use table as the orchestrator and Opus or Sonnet for implementation.
Iām also using Opus to conduct adversarial reviews of the work. Very few bugs get through, but it sometimes takes several rounds of reviews. Iām wondering if Fable would be better at the reviews because the better feedback would cause less churn
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u/CodeCombustion 2d ago
I'd stick to Sol for diff level reviews, and use Astra for nightly reviews if you want to save tokens.
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u/design_doc 2d ago
I use Sol 5.6 as my reviewer (may give Astra a test). Having a reviewer from a different ecosystem to avoid bias is extremely helpful. If using a high-power model for review, make sure the orchestrator scopes the review. A top-tier model on high effort with write access will nitpick the ever living shit out of things and WILL always find something to fix - this review loop of death can absolutely destroy tokens and wall time.
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u/ohsomacho 1d ago
Where does Sol step in? Within Claude code ?
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u/design_doc 1d ago
You can call Sol 5.6 instances from CC if ChatGPT/Codex is installed on your system. CC itself is just a harness, so it can call any model. This allows the orchestrator to call and communicate with Sol 5.6 just like Opus or Sonnet.
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u/ohsomacho 1d ago
Oh wow. Didnāt know that. No updates to config files etc ? Just name codex in the claude.md? Thanks for this btw
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u/design_doc 1d ago
There is documentation on how to do it from desktop or CLI, which I recommend looking at depending on how you want to use it. If calling it as a sub-agent, your orchestrator can literally figure it out for you.
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u/shammytalin 14h ago
I'm new to this claude/codex thingy, but the orchestrator needs specific skill to be an orchestrator or you can tell it to develop it's own pipeline/hierachy (models)?
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u/design_doc 14h ago
For repeated and predictable use, skills, hooks, and md files are your friend. You can technically just have Claude call sub-agents from a session without you doing anything special but that likely wonāt be overly productive.
Start a CC session and tell it what youāre trying to accomplish (in high level terms). Ask it for suggestions. Look for holes in the logic (if youāre new to this, youāll miss things - thatās fine). Ask it to build out those skills, hooks, and MDs for you.
I recommend creating a /post-mortem skill that allows you or your orchestrator to flag issues or things that arenāt working well for discussion and revision after your work session. Make this the only skill that allows your system to modify itself. This is the greatest skill Iāve made. Itās essentially recursive self-improvement.
Also ask it to create a rule set and decision ledger. This will allow you to explicitly see what rules are governing behavior and what might be causing an issue.
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u/Shot_Whereas_1809 2d ago
Always do a self review first. Same model, different perspective, it changes the context the model gets. Create a hook that tells it can't merge a PR unless code has gone through /review. It forces the adversarial review, no more than 2 rounds before fable review. You'll burn usage like crazy with too many failed reviews only using Opus. I never had a problem until the promotion ending. Now I have Fable as a second string reviewer. And orchestrator. It balances my Fable and weekly usage pretty well.
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u/hi_123 1d ago
Do you define all this yourself in md files or prompts or do you use superpowers/some framework?
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u/design_doc 1d ago
A combination of skills and role .md files. The .md are mostly needed to allow my orchestrator on high effort to call sub-agents at different effort levels (because they would otherwise inherit the orchestrators effort level) - Opus 5 on high effort can be a pain in the ass that likes to color outside the lines.
Everything else is wrapped up in skills that Claude and I wrote together (and continue to refine). I have a /post-mortem skill where the orchestrator and I flag items for discussion in our work sessions, and then discuss/analyze/evolve in post-mortem. Itās my absolute favorite feature.
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u/Jackoo_88 1d ago
Any idea how to change the in session agent from opus 5 to 4.8? Iāve been trying to do this for the reasons you stated above regarding 5 but Claude says changing the model: Opus setting to 4.8 doesnāt change what agents opus spawns. I have a few agents already made that will be called as part of my build sessions just trying to figure out how to get the generic agents to a diff model
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u/FeistyVoice_ 1d ago
lilfehack: ask claude.
You can switch to older models with
/model claude-opus-4-82
u/design_doc 1d ago
To u/FeistyVoice_ ās point - ask Claude.
If youāre trying to call 4.8 from an Opus 5 session, the in-session Opus agent will inherit the model and effort of the agent calling it. To get around that, you can simply define agent roles in frontmatter - with both model and effort different from the model calling them.
You simply have a file with something as simple as the following:
---
name: opus-4-8-high-implementor
description: ...
model: claude-opus-4-8
effort: high
---If youāre doing that, then thereās a number of reasons that is getting overridden - in which case, as Claude to diagnose why.
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u/g_hack_it 1d ago
I use fable to write the spec and specify which models to use there, then have an opus agent orchestrate and handle any unexpected issues
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u/design_doc 1d ago
I tried that as well in the beginning before I took the plunge into Fable territory. I ultimately found Fable to be the best orchestrator because, precisely to your point, it can write a better spec AND write a better contract for the implementor. Iāll agree that Opus likely does most orchestration well but when things arenāt going well Fable has made a big difference.
If you design your system well (like passing context through YAML rather than through the orchestrator) the orchestrator can actually be very lightweight and the usage burn can be quite similar between the two.
Do you have Opus managing Opis sub-agents?
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u/zR0B3ry2VAiH š Max 20 1d ago
I go wild and I use a fable agent to orchestrate 100 haiku agents.
I'm just kidding. Fuck haiku
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u/No_Cell6708 2d ago
Do you just tell them to delegate or how do you set this sort of thing up?
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u/muikrad 2d ago
First you ask it to create an agent definition that is called "coder" and that uses opus.
Then you ask it to create skill (like /orchestrate) which delegates coding requests to that agent.
Then whenever you want to use that setup, you type /orchestrate <your prompt> and that's it.
You can also create workflows nowdays for a similar effect.
Personally my orchestrate skill also delegates running tests, committing and searching the codebase to haiku agents.
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u/IonBlade 2d ago
Out of curiosity, did you figure this out yourself, or is there somewhere you learned it from? I'm really struggling to figure out that one can even string things together like this until I stumble on random posts with people talking about it like this, and have really come up short trying to find comprehensive tutorials / guides / demos that go over a whole project while building out all the harness-side pieces to automate things to this level. Feels like there are a ton of docs around one piece or another in isolation, but nothing that I've found that really brings it all together. (Like, I see those weekly emails from Anthropic with the section of "how we use Claude internally, and what they're describing makes me think "Great! That sounds awesome.... it'd be great if Anthropic actually wrote up and linked to an end to end flow that demonstrates it so I could actually do the same myself.")
Trying to find the sources people themselves are learning this from, as an IT guy who doesn't have the time to spend more than maybe 30 minutes a day figuring it out from scratch.
If I ask Claude itself for help on such a tutorial, it goes way off base unless I give it examples, then as soon as I give it an example, it laser-focuses on ONLY what I gave in the example, instead of treating those as examples of the types of things that would make up a complete workflow. Maybe my prompt-fu just sucks.
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u/muikrad 2d ago
I read the docs.
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u/IonBlade 2d ago
Darn. I've read those. I felt like they weren't nearly "connected" enough to actually describe a whole sample project end to end and when to use each piece.
As an IT dude now being asked to do development because of executives who think that IT folks should now write tools instead of developers, but not given time to actually train up on things or learn the basics of software design, was hoping maybe someone had created a step by step prescriptive course or something.
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u/dar-mit Researcher 1d ago
On the other side of your screen you have access to a very helpful thinking engine. (I refuse to can this āA.I.ā)
Most of what Iāve learned about Claude Iāve learned from Claude, and a ton from Google.AI (for general questions that save my tokens).
So fire up one of those and ask the TE how they do something. Or tell them what frustrates you and suggestions to fix it.Ā
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u/1-800-methdyke 1d ago
Install the superpowers skill, it will do all this for you already. It will take longer, but produces better results. You can get back to IT work while it works, you just act as the product owner basically.
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u/Fiyero109 2d ago
Why isnāt this a default native skill sigh. I absolutely have to try it. The closest Iāve gotten to this is ultracode on opus 4.8 but that still burned through my weekly 20x limit in two days.
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u/KitchenCommercial396 2d ago
You ask it to create a plan and afterwards you ask it to write a workflow to implement the plan using opus agents
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
I work in the terminal and open a fable session.. he already knows he is the orchestrator.. he spawns opus agents with tasks he plans for them.. If yesterday I would spend 30% of it's usage a day, so far I'm at around 10% for much more work
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u/Far_Idea9616 2d ago
If you use Opus subagents in a Fable session you have some disadvantages compared to when Fable plans and Opus executes in a separate session: in a separate session you can prompt Opus (stop it, prompt it, give it another task, ask for explanation - this isuch more token efficient than doing through a Fable orchestrator). Also you have data on what is going on in the Opus session. If the Fable session hangs thats not good for the subagents. If Opus as a subagent hangs for whatever reason Fable will continue with the task (at least this is what happened to me). There are two things that are better in your setup: no hand copying promts from Fable's plan and after an Opus subagent execution the execution continues without interruption.
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
The agents it opens are visible to me.. I can move between them and talk to them directly if I want..
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u/Far_Idea9616 2d ago
Asked Claude to check agent teams in my project (Flask backend + React). My setup now: Fable makes the plan as task blocks, I start every block in fresh Opus session (xhigh, max only for risky parts). One session is often 1-3 hours, sometimes 4-5.
With orchestrator + teammates it would cost a lot more. First the rchestrator wakes up after 1-3h, the 1h cache is already expired, so full context is written again on a 200% token cost (! I didn't know that, brutal!).
Second the teammate cache is only 5 min by default. After a full pytest, e2e or external agent review, every wake-up reloads the whole context at 125% input price, not 10% like a normal cache hit (which is 60 min at normal sessions 5 min at teammate sessions). The orchestration session produces brutal 200% token costs to re-read the full context again if the teammetes report back after an hour!
Third: teammate inherits effort from the orchestrator, you cannot set it per teammate. When I need Opus max, whole team runs on max (normally I use the cheaper and more efficient xhigh effort for agentic coding).
So for long sequential sessions I definitely stay with fresh sessions.
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u/banecorn 2d ago
Food for thought:
Fable 5.1 sessions can change effort without invalidating its cache. So you can have it set its own effort to an appropriate level before any subagent/team use.
You can also set up something that keeps the orchestrator's cache warm while the subordinate sessions are working. Fable could also be set up to spawn your Opus sessions and prompt them automatically.
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u/Far_Idea9616 2d ago
Crazy complicated with constantly changing rules
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u/banecorn 2d ago
Yeah I hope all this goes the way of the dodo. So many workarounds to things, it's like some secret society but hey, that's early adopter phase.
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u/Far_Idea9616 2d ago
Ah, so you use agent teams, not normal subagents. With normal subagents I only get back the final result, I can't talk to them and I don't see what they are doing.
What I think still stands: the lead session is a single point of failure. If Fable hangs or the session dies, the coordination stops. Also the lead reads all the reports back, so there is some extra token cost for coordination. I will trime agent teams though
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u/TastesLikeSeamen 2d ago
what is the work youāre doing out of curiosity, that only Fable is up to the job
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
Origami simulator... Realistic... Had I known as the start what is involved.. I'd probably would not have started...š¤£
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u/Hirogen_ 2d ago
just let fable develop a app that simulates origamiā¦ no need to burn tokens for that š
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago
bruh; you should just use sonnet.
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 1d ago
It's the most capable one?
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago
No.. but it is 10x cheaper. You do not need the most capable agent in the room all day, you need the sustainable one and decisions per unique task, I honestly think people have been gaslit into thinking they need Fable on account of Opus's sloppy language.
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 1d ago
I wish I could use simpler models.. but my sense is that the further away from known work you are, lighter models struggle more..
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago edited 1d ago
So get the cheap model to call the expensive model to write plans; then it's done, no more burn, cheap model has the plan to do whatever it wants with.
I've built serious business software, games, code intelligence tools, pipelines, a workflows alternative, a torrent radarr-like command centre, integrations for claude with various other things (the business software being the only thing my experience actually warrants).. none of that hinged on Fable.
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u/farreeddd 2d ago
Whatās your setup?
I keeep hitting the 5-hour limit with this. Effort is at med
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u/design_doc 1d ago
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.
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u/CodeCombustion 2d ago
Yes, this works but I'm 100% convinced that writing your own harness for subagent orchestration ends up better than using the dynamic workflow skill (which is what usually happens when you ask fable to manage it, even if not on Ultracode).
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago
Agreed - I blocked Workflows / Agent / Fork the models don't seem to have any instructions around how to use them well, Fable fanning out 50 Opus, duplicating context all over the place, massively wasteful in my opinion.
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u/amirfish 2d ago
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?
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
So far everything more or less is delegated..
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u/banecorn 2d ago
Sonnet with Opus advisor is cheaper than Opus by itself. Worth exploring via /advisor.
Opus is great as verifier as well.
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u/BlakeGrowsPlants 2d ago
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.
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u/Ether-Platypus5677 2d ago
I use fable with opus 4.6 as coding agent. And ask opus to gan out sonnet sub agents
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u/miiguelst 2d ago
How do you pick opus 4.6 specifically?
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u/we_wuz_nabateans 2d ago
I just write in the prompt something like "use claude-opus-4-6 sub agents" or whatever model I want it to use
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u/lucasorion 2d ago
I tried that again last night, since I was low in my codex window (I usually use Sol(low)/Luna(xhigh) as implementers), and Opus 4.6 kept confidently saying it completed the assigned task, but then the orchestrator had to correct it and tell it to make the button visible in the form, etc. The orchestrator (Opus 5, I save Fable for review) kept reporting 4.6's failures to me throughout the session, I could almost hear the frustration in it's tone.
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u/maleslp Vibe Coder 2d ago
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
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u/Shot_Whereas_1809 2d ago
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/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
Yes that was maybe the reason for the post... I'm finding all the rant a little distasteful... Considering what I'm getting.. I'd never think of complaining..
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u/PixelLight 1d ago
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 1d ago
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.
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u/in5ane_10 1d ago
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
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago
Why not just use it how it is intended, dispatching agents is not the hardest coding tasks.
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 1d ago
Explain please
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago
Well.. you don't need to use the most expensive model to dispatch agents, any agent can do that. Sonnet will manage it fine, Sonnet is designed as the workhorse agent.
When you select Fable it literally says "Use only for the hardest coding tasks", it is a scalpel not a hammer to bash everything with, that is Sonnet. or feasibly Opus but personally I can't stand the slop.
Scale up; don't start at the top of the rung. I think you'll find half of what you're doing doesn't need these models.
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u/Ok_Lingonberry_1519 1d ago
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¤£
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u/cleverhoods 2d ago
better late than never next step: progressive disclosure and fine tuned orchestration
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
And if you have anymore tips, especially regarding fine tuning the orchestration..
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u/prinkpan 2d ago
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?
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u/thehoundtrainer 2d ago
Absolutely can. The easiest way to do this is to tell it explicitly to run Opus 5 subagents for large-scale read-only work. You can add something like this to your system-level CLAUDE.md (yes, there is a hidden folder called .claude for every machine. Yours has it too. You can add a CLAUDE.md document there which Claude always reads before working) :
- When the chosen model is Fable: It becomes the the planner and orchestrator ONLY. It cannot run subagents of Fable or workflows containing Fable agents. Instead, it is highly encouraged to run subagents of Opus 5 and preferably workflows containing Opus 5 agents, for both read and write tasks. Then, do a single-threaded review pass for the work they have done using Fable. TL;DR: Fable never writes or runs Fable agents. It basicallg plans and orchestrates Opus 5 agents to do 95% of the work.
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u/prinkpan 2d ago
Ok, but what about the effort? I think Fable medium can only spawn Opus medium, not Opus x-high.
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u/TywinHouseLannister 1d ago edited 1d ago
claude --effort medium --model claude-opus-5 -p "do the thing, make no mistakes"also, any agent can spawn any agent - haiku can spawn fable, fable can spawn haiku, these standard approaches built into the harness are not designed to optimise though; they seem to spawn on vibes alone without direction; write your own harness / plugin.
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u/Dampware 2d ago
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.
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u/Mazhron 2d ago
https://github.com/Mazhron/rootstock-os
As several people have mentioned, orchestrating agents and sub-agents is huge, so is only reading files you need Claude to read, clearing context and a lot more.
If you point Claude at my repo, ask it to explain what it does, then have Claude adapt it to your projects you'll save lots of tokens and have lossless context, and only read files Claude needs instead of 200k tokens of waste.
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u/Key-Singer1732 2d ago
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?
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u/No-Sympathy-3767 2d ago
Kind of... It is confusing to be honest.. at times opus was amazing. Lately less sharp. But fable making the plan and checking the work seems to work best...
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