What really burns tokens is sub agents. I once gave Claude Code a pretty big task, and it immediately launched 7 sub agents which burned through my budget before even one of them was finished. Tried again 5 hours later: same result.

If I let the main agent do the same task sequentially, it was no problem at all. I don't know if it's really just communication and orchestration that makes sub agents so inefficient, or if Anthropic figured that most people using sub agents pay per token on a big corporate account, so this is an easy way to make more money from tokenmaxxers.

As a counterpoint: in a complex project, Fable's "curiosity" may be exactly what you want for an exploration and planning stage - not just for the orchestrator that turns your prompt into different angles with which to explore, but for each subagent whose task is to search the codebase for one of those "angles." If you truly want no stone unturned, letting those subagents spawn their own discoveries, and recursively grow the surface area of the inquiry, then it's quite reasonable to want Fable throughout.

That said, if your project is "do this well-planned thing on a bunch of things in parallel" then you should absolutely be instructing to have subagents "step down" to less curious models. Their output may well be more cohesive as a result!

For a while everyone was saying sub agents is how you save tokens, use lower quality models with limited context to do simple parts of the job after a smart planning agent has put it all in place. Is that no longer true or is this just the result of sub agent being used at the wrong time?

Sub agents each have to read part of your code base again to get enough context for the task. And if they take too long, your orchestrator's context is no longer in cache so you pay full price for that again once the subagents finish

If you do it sequentially you only read those files approximately once, and everything hits the same prefix cache

Every subagent send the same ~30k system prompts. If you are using fable/opus, that's easily 30% of a 5-hour window for 7 subagent, before doing any work

This is why I happily use Codex.

I run it basically 24/7 on a ~500k line repo, and only rarely run out of quota before the end of the week.

My experience with Claude Code was very good until about 2.5 months ago, and then it suddenly turned unbelievably terrible for me.

I have not and will hopefully never look back.

I still have PTSD from how ungodly terrible it was that last week of using it.

And in my experience the sub agent performance is usually worse than just a single agent.

Spawning a bunch of agents seems to happen randomly. I almost never want this.

> What really burns tokens is sub agents. I once gave Claude Code a pretty big task, and it immediately launched 7 sub agents which burned through my budget before even one of them was finished. Tried again 5 hours later: same result.

Probably because the general purpose subagents inherit the parent model.

I tell Claude explicitly to use Explore subagents, which use Haiku only, now.

Subagents with a fat tailed latency distribution completely masks the trough filling that puts the most downwards pressure on per-token COGS.

This is why the subscription plans are forced through the harness (the "OpenClaw Wars"): it creates a false equivalence in the minds of many customers between API tokens (latency sensitive, easy to measure) and Claude Code tokens (remnant backfill to stay to the right of the roofline, marginal cost often zero).

Selling sausage as sirloin is a great business if people go for it. And there's nothing inherently wrong with spot pricing, as long as you're honest about it...

for subagents to be cheap/effective, you have to specify the size of those subagents; i.e. right now by default 5.6-sol spawns many 5.6-sol subagents. 5.4-mini as subagent saves me tons of tokens. 5.6-sol audits the work before accepting it, so there's not really a quality issue.

It's in the best interest for AI companies to gobble up tokens. I feel like every new release - Fable, etc - is just a way to extract more tokens/money.

--disallowedTools Task

Did it deploy five AWS m8g.12xlarge instances?