[HN Gopher] /architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orches...
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/architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews,
Codex builds
Author : DanMcInerney
Score : 57 points
Date : 2026-06-12 20:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
HTML web link (github.com)
TEXT w3m dump (github.com)
| colechristensen wrote:
| Last night I switched back to Codex for a minute having burned
| through my tokens for the week with Fable and oh boy I had a
| terrible experience. Running in circles over simple problems
| (which I ended up solving myself, like a peasant) and running
| "terraform apply" several times despite several instructions all
| over the place to never do that. The performance difference was
| stark.
| malshe wrote:
| I had a similar experience. So far Fable has been a game
| changer, at least for the work I used it for. Having said that,
| I think its writing is definitely worse than GPT 5.5. Ethan
| Mollick also observed the same. He called it more "Claudy." It
| generates worse academic prose than other frontier models.
| nsingh2 wrote:
| Could you provide some details, if possible, like what model &
| thinking effort, what kinds of tasks? I used to swap between
| Claude Code and Codex often, and these days use Codex more
| because of the usage limits. Wondering if I should go to Claude
| for a month, I get a strange FOMO when I read vague comments
| like this.
|
| The one major difference I noticed is that the GPT models are
| more analytical (e.g. better at mathematical analysis, code
| review) vs Claude models tend to write more straight forward
| code. Besides that I don't really see any significant
| differences.
|
| There are a few gotchas with swapping, like being careful with
| AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md naming (Claude Code only recognizes
| CLAUDE.md, and I think Codex only works with AGENTS.md), and
| updating skill files to match the tool.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I just symlink AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md
|
| I was using gpt-5.5 high. Writing terraform code for GCP,
| debugging app launch and Dockerfile issues, that sort of
| thing. It was going in loops hallucinating features of GCP,
| looking things up in strange ways, running terraform apply
| after being explicitly told in the last interaction not to,
| and overall not solving problems. These were very
| straightforward tasks and it couldn't be trusted for five
| minutes. It's the difference in what I would trust an early
| senior engineer to do vs what I would trust an unreliable
| high school intern to do.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, simply by not using it!
|
| > I am fairly convinced this is the shape serious agent work
| keeps converging toward.
|
| "this" being "plan with expensive model, implement with cheap
| model".
|
| Anyone who follows HN would be hard-pressed to disagree; this
| architecture is re-invented twice monthly.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/groups/vibecodinglife/posts/1946207...
| https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/10628
| https://build5nines.com/stop-burning-premium-requests-how-to...
|
| > Not because it is aesthetically pleasing. Because every other
| shape eventually runs into the same boring failures: context rot,
| self-grading, goalpost drift, and merge chaos.
|
| Actual failure isn't boring. But struggling through a generated
| software project that celebrates its own genius and doesn't have
| a single self-critical or genuinely reflective thing to say...at
| least watching paint dry I might get giddy off the fumes.
|
| I'm not interested in critiquing the project itself, either,
| you'll just run that through a model, too.
| seaal wrote:
| >https://www.facebook.com/groups/vibecodinglife/posts/1946207..
| .
|
| wow linking a facebook groups post might actually be worse than
| x, is there an xcancel alternative for facebook?
| DanMcInerney wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of this. It is generated software,
| and it's not a novel idea. I didn't mean for it to come off
| like that. It's just solving an itch that I couldn't find a
| solution to and I'm getting a lot of personal utility out of
| it. I do have a lot of experience with agentic memory, multi-
| agent systems and harnesses and wasn't super impressed by the
| workflow of Fable calling opus subagents so I figured I'd apply
| best practices to what already exists to make it a teensy bit
| better and easier to use.
| felixgallo wrote:
| Fable will do this itself, by spawning Opus/Sonnet subagents to
| do easy work.
| RazerWazer wrote:
| GPT 5.5 xhigh is better than Opus and Sonnet.
| timcobb wrote:
| Not in my subjective experience sadly
| sosodev wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted. It's true.
| Averaged across a wide variety of benchmarks Fable is the
| only Anthropic model that performs better than GPT 5.5 xhigh.
| Eridrus wrote:
| The problem is that there are a bunch of benchmarks, the
| model providers often don't even use the same benchmarks, a
| bunch of them have known problems, and it's expensive to do
| your own benchmarks.
|
| I am a GPT 5.x booster since to me it just feels smarter,
| and I generally felt like the benchmarks backed me up, but
| it's not every benchmark, so sadly we're mostly arguing
| about vibes.
|
| SWEBench-Pro was a big one, though apparently Claude was
| reading solutions out of the .git folder it wasn't meant to
| have access to among other problems.
| smoe wrote:
| I find it fascinating that every time this kind of
| discussion comes up, people talk about night and day
| experiences between Claude and Codex, in both directions.
| I'm really wondering what people are doing to get such
| different outcomes.
|
| I'm currently working on two projects/clients one using
| Claude, one using Codex. I have a strong preference for
| the latter, but not because I think it is much more
| intelligent or writes much better code. It is simply
| because I find the way of interacting with it more
| pleasant: more literal, mechanical, makes fewer
| assumption and or double checks, and is less proactive in
| my experience. At least until some updates over the last
| few weeks.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I think I like Codex for the same reason tbh. I think
| it's just general misanthropy or autism or something lol.
| Most people seem to prefer Claude.
|
| For me, I think Codex was visibly smarter than Claude
| until 4.8 came out, it would regularly do better
| debugging and IMO write better code. 4.8 I think is
| close.
|
| I think Claude is widely regarded to have a big lead in
| front-end, which I do not work on.
|
| Claude's Ultrathink is pretty cool, though it eats up
| tokens like nothing else obviously.
| AlphaSite wrote:
| It probably means they're close enough that there's no
| observable difference. Or better at every different
| things.
| apsurd wrote:
| /advisor has been really good experience for me especially with
| having only a Pro plan.
|
| I exclusively use sonnet and advisor is basically "hey opus
| chime in on my approach". been working great as far as i can
| tell.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Reduce fable token usage even more by not using it. What a clever
| idea, op! Wow.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| DESIGN.md:
|
| > Each rule below is enforced mechanically by the skill, not left
| to vibes.
|
| > R1. Repo docs are the memory; not in HANDOFF.md = didn't happen
|
| SKILL.md:
|
| > Not in docs/HANDOFF.md = didn't happen. Refuse to judge results
| that exist only in conversation or builder chat output.
|
| "Mechnical enforcement" just means "prompting the LLM a bit
| extra" these days? It (still) amazes me how much effort and
| tokens we expend on what could and should be a two line script...
| everforward wrote:
| Agents are in a wacky state, which makes projects like this
| fall into a weird spot. Eg I vaguely expect my agent to do two
| disparate things: manage dependency injection for tools, prompt
| modifications, etc, but also be the sort of "brain trust" that
| controls the flow of execution (can we stop now, do we keep
| going, etc).
|
| This project is meant to be the latter, but there's not a clean
| way to integrate that into Claude Code or Codex because they
| expect to do both.
|
| Pi can do it, but then your users can't use their Claude
| subscriptions, so you have to cludgily try to do the same thing
| via LLM prompts.
| diavelguru wrote:
| yes I'm using Fable to inspect, generate plan and architectural
| docs then using Gemini to implement then have Fable review, find
| bugs. saving lots of usage.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Fool me once. Fool me twice. Fool me thirty three times and here
| we are trying lucky number 34.
| avaer wrote:
| Reducing token usage is this year's "one weird trick". It doesn't
| make sense on the face of it.
|
| Even _if_ one discovered something that millions (billions?) of
| dollars of AI compute and the best statisticians in the world was
| not able to find via exhaustive research, domain search and
| training... what do you think are the chances this won 't be
| folded into the next update of every model, making the rigmarole
| moot?
|
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and
| technology-shattering innovations in AI are not know to come from
| a markdown.
| apsurd wrote:
| incentives aren't aligned
| rockwotj wrote:
| I actually just started doing this by having Fable roleplay as
| Jeff Dean and to use Codex as Sanjay driving the implementation
| and have them go back and forth. Works really well and it's cool
| to see AI pair program
| analogpixel wrote:
| I know how to reduce Fable tokens by 100% ;
| https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
| cohix wrote:
| I do exactly this with awman workflows:
| https://github.com/prettysmartdev/awman/blob/main/docs/05-wo...
|
| You can use any agent and/or model for each step and share
| context between them.
| DanMcInerney wrote:
| ANNNNNND it's gone. Guys, I found a way to reduce Fable token
| usage 100%. You can find it here: github.com/USGov/idiotic-
| overreach.
| corvad wrote:
| Who's gonna tell them...
| Retr0id wrote:
| > freezes the gates
|
| LLM-written readmes love to use inscrutable jargon that means
| nothing outside of the context window that birthed it.
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