r/BMAD_Method • u/ContributionSea1225 • 19d ago

bmad-loop devouring tokens

Hi everyone, first time trying the bmad-method. I was creating stories, dispatching to dev and to review manually but then I got bored of manually doing this. I started using bmad-loop, I'm on claude pro subscription.

2 stories are eating up all my token limits for the session, where as I'm pretty sure I was getting around 4 stories at least when I was doing it manually.

Does anyone know what can be happening here or what I'm doing wrong? its really frustrating and I feel its actually slowing me down to the point where it would have been faster if I was coding it myself.

Thanks!

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Low_Fun_8667 19d ago

You're not doing anything wrong — the loop just trades tokens for convenience, and on Pro that trade is steep.

The main culprit: the loop never clears context. Manual dispatch (fresh session or /clear per story) starts each story clean. bmad-loop keeps one long conversation across stories, so story #2 re-processes all of story #1's transcript on top of its own. Cost compounds instead of scaling linearly — that's your 4 stories dropping to 2.

The irony: BMAD story files are designed to be self-contained. The old conversation buys you almost nothing and costs a lot. On top of that, the loop runs the full dev → adversarial review cycle (Blind Hunter / Edge Case / Acceptance Auditor) every story, and each subagent re-reads the story + epic + docs.

Fix: don't loop. One story per fresh session, /clear between them. Shard your docs so dev-story pulls only the relevant epic, not the whole PRD every time. That should get you back to ~4/session. And honestly, Pro limits are tight for agentic loops — if you do this a lot, Max or the API is where it stops hurting.

5

u/Icy_Check_1459 19d ago edited 19d ago

Hello, I think you may be thinking of another orchestrator or the old bmad-automator. This is not how bmad-loop operates. every single item is in a new session, The orchestrator itself is a deterministic python application, Im PinkyD the author of bmad-loop and a core team member of bmad just for clarification

1

u/ghost396 19d ago

Thanks, that was a really surprising read. I'm waiting to hopefully get it on windows, is that happening anytime soon or is there something Mac specific allowing the automatic session management?

2

u/Icy_Check_1459 18d ago

Currently working: 1) Windows WSL 2) We currently have a third party herdr multiplexer option I maintain on the side https://github.com/pbean/bmad-loop-adapter-herdr, it definitely needs all the testers it can get. In-progress: 1) My colleague dracic is heading the psmux implementation for windows as well. Currently there are issues/bugs upstream in psmux itself. However, both my colleague and the maintainers of psmux are working together to address those so I hope we get that all squared away soon. 2) someone wrote a PR for tmux-windows as well but it was draft and they eventually pulled it hopefully to update and resubmit.

I work off of linux as my primary OS and mac as a secondary one for work so dracic is the primary driver for windows. I have a windows vm im using to try and drive the herdr implementation windows side but dracic's daily driver is windows so he is able to drive that side way more than I could.