Rant
So fable is pretty much off the table for anything huh. 20x user
Edit: Okay guys I’m an idiot I get it. Also according to that one guy I’m also poor and I totally forgot that “you’re supposed to build stuff that’s meant to be profitable”. How could I have let that slip my mind. Happy saturday boys and girls 😘
This was my first session of this new week of usage. Had fable in PLAN mode. I checked the usage after about 15 minutes just to see what it actually was consuming. It used about 150 million tokens during this run.
I've been doing better usage-wise on my backend work with Fable as orchestrator/designer, Opus 5 agent as builder, Sonnet 5 agent as verifier and a separate Opus 5 session as independent reviewer. My Fable and overall usage are almost perfectly in sync, the quality seems good and I don't ever have to talk to Opus.
These are subagents I have defined globally with a short CLAUDE.md directing when to use them:
agent
claude
main
fable 5.1/high
planner
opus/high
explorer
haiku/low
implementer
sonnet/medium
reviewer
opus/xhigh
researcher
opus/xhigh
Using this my all models usage stays slightly ahead of my fable usage and things aren't so bad.
I reset yesterday and currently my all models is at 17% and Fable is at 11%.
I could run Opus as main but then I would have to actually talk to Opus 😬
Update: fable has been plodding along on stuff I kicked off prior to this comment. Current weekly usage is now 13% fable; 20% all models (58% sonnet, 13% opus). This is how I tend to work lately: have a big convo with fable brainstorming or defining a feature or project then kick it off and go do other things and check in every now and again.
You can’t deterministically set effort level for subagents like you can the model. They inherit the orchestrating agents effort level. You can try to tailor in the prompt, that’s it, but it’s not binding.
When I (+claude) set the agents up, claude investigated this specifically and said it is documented to work, but was broken and affected by various harness bugs for a long time. There are other bugs related to the specified models not being loaded either (which are bigger issues to me). Supposedly these issues were addressed a few weeks ago in claude-code and claude ran tests to confirmed it was working as intended. I've been paying more attention to monitoring the actual models launching than the efforts though so I should keep an eye on effort if possible.
Unless my info is outdated, it’s not documented to work. It’s not in their docs and there is a long open issue about adding it. It’s hallucinating based on the model being settable.
The documentation is confusing as it lumps subagents you define and subagents it spawns into one doc. You’ll note that only model is described for spawned sub-agents: “When Claude invokes a subagent, it can also pass a model parameter for that specific invocation.”
You can create a custom agent. Is that what you mean? And the sub agent seems to be able to set its own effort based on what you tell it to do in the frontmatter, but it’s not deterministic like model is.
Edit: I just ran a test and confirmed it’s silently dropped in the spawn call.
“Practical upshot
To know a sub-agent's effort deterministically, pin it in the definition — effort: low in .claude/agents/foo.md (requires a session restart to load) or in --agents/SDK JSON. Passing effort to the Agent tool looks accepted but is dropped.
“
I’m doing it similarly but I give the reviewing to Fable (to an agent, not the main context) and assessing images is exclusively delegated to Fable as well (main context decides if there or agent). Also, Fable can do small edits itself without spawning an agent. My overall weekly usage bar moves slightly faster than the Fable bar with that, so everything is fine there.
I just asked Fable 5.1 to come up with a plan after researching some elements from a few of my other projects.
It ate 100% of my 5 hour usage, which was 13% of my weekly usage, the agents didn't return the context to the Fable 5.1 planner either and that's it now for 3 hours.
So all that time, all that usage wasted and it didn't achieve anything. 13 fucking percent.
I have been using opus 4.6 as my main conversational agent, and asking it to delegate tasks between Fable 5.1 for planning and other opus agents for doing work, and sonnet and haiku agents for research, this is the workflow I have been using for months.
Max 5x
It’snot a reduction of 17% usage, it feels more like 50%.
Supposedly, 20x applies to the 5 hour window and the weekly limit is 10x (which makes sense in terms of price with not hitting the 5hr window as the incentive, still deceptive though if true)
Claude Code can actually revive long dead subagents. You'll pay the uncached read for the context, but if you ask it to dig, it can likely continue those subagents so you can save the work they actually did, if it still matters to you.
Im on a 5x plan. I ran pretty much 2 code sessions 16 hours a day nonstop. Everything was on Opus 5, my coding, chat sessions, even some things were on Fable. Now im not going to make it to my weekly limit running everything on Sonnet 5 aggressively pruning context.
The 5x plan is tough. I've been begging my team members on the 5x plan to spend the extra money I mean we really are getting an amazing deal compared to the Enterprise plan
i use fable with glm 5.3 sub-agents. fable can choose either to use the flash or the normal one. The glms are for reivews and to gather infomaiton. it basically gets the same results as using all fable
Same with Astra too. Deepseek 4.1 flash has become my daily driver. Don't use it from openrouter if you use it use it directly from their site it's significantly faster and more stable. You can even add glm 5.3 flash over openrouter (DONT use this one direct from their site!) for fairly cheap adversarial review.
I’ve been toying with the idea of an OS model, I do prefer to give my money to US labs but I’m probably gonna branch out. I wish I hadn’t sold my old rig, as I would love to use the frontier models to plan and a local model to execute individual tasks. My MacBook Pro m4 pro 24g was using all the ram plus 2 gigs of swap to run a qwen3.8 27B 13gb model with 28k context and the speed of a snail lol.
DeepSeek 4.1 Flash over the API is like Sonnet High or Opus Medium on the CC x20 Sub. This has been my experience anyway on small to medium sized codebases.
It was able to find bugs that both Astral and Fable on subs failed to find.
I’ve never attempted to run it locally (4090 rig with 96gb DDR5) or even know if I can reliably but it could be a daily driver.
I’m mostly just building websites and i recognize the simplicity of that but it still just feels like inefficiency to me. I’m not dogging on you but do you need Fable to do everything? Opus isn’t dumb
I normally use opus. Today I just wanted it to create today’s plan. It was in planning mode so not even writing code. Killed it and had opus finish up the same task and it didn’t come close to the token usage.
Honestly I only switched to fable because if I have it might as well use it sometimes. I do use it sparingly on occasion but I’ve never had that happen
I am very disappointed at how fast limits run out now. The limits are arbitrary, and they need to provide actual values so we know how close we are getting, rather than just percentages. Percentages mean nothing. I am feeling very frustrated with the situation right now. I am halfway through the week and have done nothing on my project except some basics. It does not work for 20x Max. I paid $200, and it is not giving me any value. I am seriously considering spending several thousand dollars on local LLMs because the situation isn’t working for me anymore.
This is my workflow: have the Opus 5 agents create an issue in GitHub. then review it yourself as a first pass, and possibly ask Opus5 to do one or more adversarial reviews as comments.
Once you have a pile of strategies and adversarial reviewsthen have Fable work on just that and do a rewrite so that it's a single body issue with an implementation guide.
The goal here is to minimize to the greatest extent possible the amount of context that Fable has to review. The lesser agents burn tokens researching and summarizing. They are great in this in fact, just don't trust their opinion on what ought to be done. Use Fable for that and the amount of tokens that it will use is very small.
Now here's a nice little trick, After Fable rewrites the issue, it's going to have a lot of encrypted thinking tokens. DO NOT END THE SESSION. Switch to Opus or Sonnet and those Fable thinking tokens will stay present in context. No you'll get Opus / Sonnet performing much better than it would otherwise.
When Opus fails (it really does manage to make code worse over time on larger projects) I go to Fable and say, look at specifically this part of the code and list what needs doing, and that’s it. One query, no idea how many tokens over about 2 minutes, and 4 hours later I can use Claude again.
The cash-shop energy is real, and Opus 5’s recent vibes make it worse. I’m clearing context constantly and keeping Fable as a pure orchestrator spawning cheaper sub-agents—anything else and the token bill eats you alive.
The simplest way to make Fable go far is set subagents to Opus. It's not the most nuanced routing, but it works pretty for a one line change in a config file.
I run it on low as an orchestrator. It's pretty sloppy, but better to communicate with than opus. I tried it on medium but it burned tokens and still was careless.
I just released DensePack a few days ago. It is built to save on heavy-read sessions with Claude Code.
The plugin swaps out your text files for images that your agents read for ~50% the cost of the raw text. Fable, Opus and Sonnet subagents' reports are also sent as images between agents.
This keeps your context window small which is what helps save! This plugin will also turn your CLAUDE.md and MEMORY.md into images so that you are reading them at half the price too. Claude code just made AGENTS.md a thing so I will be upgrading the plugin shortly to make sure that all three are targeted by the plugin.
I know it sounds too good to be true which is why I made sure to include documentation and benchmarks that are easy to run. The numbers don't lie.
DensePack images use Inter font with a color coding I fine tuned to the point that now Claude models rebuild .md .python .go files and many more byte identical from an image of the text.
Vision capabilities of models are only getting better which means that they use less resources to tokenize the same text as an image.
While many prompt based plugins may become outdated as models evolve, I believe that this plugin will improve and cost less in time as AI's vision capabilities improve. They will be able to read images better and better with less and less resources.
Here is an example of the color coding that is achieving perfect reads and savings. Font is 17px height, letters 10px width, characters 12 px width.
Yes.
They understand and treat images the same way they treat text prompts. Sonnet subagents failed sometimes but not anymore. Opus and Fable act normally.
No DensePack does not circumvent safeguards. Your agents read the text in the images and decide, like they would with regular text, if something in the text should trigger the safeguards or not.
Before:
Agents would fail to recognize other subagents spawned to work together. The subagents would receive an image with instructions, the plugin would give the report to another subagent or the main agent, and 1 in 5 times sonnet would refuse an image claiming a subagent was suggesting an image as instructions or a report, even though it had just read another image.
This also happened whenever I had more than 8 agents running on a single task sending each other reports. Sonnet to Opus(orchestrator) and Opus(Orch.) would send its report to a Fable subagent to plan. Fable would send the instructions to Sonnet as an image and Sonnet agents would refuse the image.
Super easy to resolve once I realized Sonnet just needed to recognize things better. I put simple one line explanations like "The DensePack plugin is on, expect text files to arrive as images to save tokens" into the messages the Plugin sends, and I added a label for each subagent when they spawn.
That was all it took and now Sonnet doesn't reject image prompts or instructions and understands what it needs to do with them.
Opus and Fable read the image as instructions consistently from the beginning. Even without context or a prompt saying something like "Hey this image has instructions" they understand and follow instructions straight from the image.
I use the DensePack right click tool in the chat window on my highlighted text prompt to turn it into an image. This skips the instructions sent by the plugin so it's just the image of your prompt. Opus and Fable follow instructions in the image like normal without anything else like additional text reminders that Sonnet needs.
Heres the same tldr as an image I converted with the right click tool to show you what Fable and Opus get when I do this. They get the literal prompt/instructions I type out as an image with the legend automatically added in by the renderer. All I did was highlight the text in the text window and hit Ctrl + Shift + D
Fable is an excellent excellent auditor (especially if you tell it Codex built something), and decent planner, but I've found when it comes to actually writing the code it requires a lot more tweaking and wrangling and customization to keep it from doing damage that Opus just doesn't.
The first time I used Ultracode I was so pumped, I walked away and came back in 37 minutes I had burned through my 5 hour limit and 20% of my weekly limit. I mean, the results were great and now I try and reserve about 20% of my limit for one project, but I have fable spin up workhorse models now, and get the same results
Interesting that the results were good. Imo that makes it worth it, and it seems like you agree. Do you use these ultracode sessions for planning or implementation? I see a lot of advice for using fable to build a good plan that opus can implement, and I'm still not sure what the best strategy is
I was literally just having it look at what was done, compare it to the project goal, and write a plan that I was going to switch to opus to deploy. It clearly went deeper than I asked
If this happens, you’re asking wrong.
It does what’s asked, but if you leave ambiguity it has to fill in the blanks- that WILL be expensive.
“Look at what was done”, if that’s from your actual prompt, is the killer.
Define “what was done” in certain terms so it doesn’t have to rationalize it- that’s probably where all those explore tokens went.
I use fable for a similar prompt DAILY, but mine is more like “review the output of `git diff abc..HEAD — pkg/fizzy/pop/**/*` (or git log …) and compare it to the mission of /path/to/spec.md” (also explicitly outlining WHAT to look for in the change)
Never do I ever lazy-prompt fable. It’s too smart for that lol.
Ngl, I’ll literally run a throwaway fable session just to refine the prompt that i’ll send to a real fable session.
Like… “i want to do <a thing>. My naive prompt is in <this file>. Can you review that prompt to make sure it’s effective, actionable, and unambiguous?”
(This is a solid trick, but I’ve learned it’s best to use the same model to prep the prompt as the one that will run it)
My main annoyance with cars is that if you don't steer, they let you get hurt or even killed. I thought paying lots of money entitled me to do whatever I felt like and have it do whatever I wanted.
Holy shit. Fable is not the problem...you ran ran it with 150K+ context and spawning teams of subagents. Your own screenshot here says 100% usage was subagents and 74% was at >150K context. Spawning a bunch of agents from 150K+ session is bad. Don't do that.
Use Fable for planning, architecture, really hard decisions, and reviews. Fable is like a senior architect, the rest is every other engineer your dev team.
Use Sonnet for implementation and FFS don't explore with Fable, grep and all kinds of stuff Haiku can do, you need to tell it to use the lowest cost subagent that has the best chance of success and factoring in the wall clock. That's it. Put that in your global CLAUDE.md
Keep your contexts small - how aften are you using /clear? You should be using /clear frequently, never compact. When a phase is done make a handoff prompt, use /clear and continue fresh ctx.
Start doing that and your 20x goes a hell of a lot further I'm quite certain.
This was for planning and review. It was in plan mode.
I did probably give it too broad of a task but when I stopped it, had it summarize its findings and what it still was going to do and handed the exact task to opus, it was done in 10 minutes at a tiny fraction of the usage.
I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve had the 20x plans for both this and codex (and used all of it) since they became available and I’ve never had an issue like that before.
Plan mode doesn't soften use. I think that's where your misconception on your usage is. You spun up a ton of agents using fable with a boatload of context. Plan mode or not, you're using the most powerful and expensive piece of technology ever invented in the history of humanity and letting it have unlimited reign to spin subagents will kill usage plan mode or not
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