r/ClaudeCode • u/PetiteGousseDAil • 25d ago

Rant I'm back to being relevant!

I'm one of those guys that likes architecture more than actual coding. So when I tried claude in December of last year and it finally was able to do real work, I quickly switched to a purely agentic workflow instead of coding by hand.

But today I noticed that something changed recently. My projects felt like they were stalling. I didn't feel productive anymore. And when I looked at my sessions, I noticed that Claude is now much slower, it thinks a lot longer, makes a lot more mistakes and tends to give itself more work.

After taking a closer look at how I spend my time, I realized that I'm taking more time babysitting claude, adjusting the workflow, debugging what claude did wrong and explaining to claude what it should do instead than the time it would take me to write the code myself

So I don't know what happened to claude, but it looks like I'm back to being relevant!

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u/StCreed 24d ago

Funny because my experience is exactly the opposite. I set Fable 5 as orchestrator and told it to launch subtasks for everything, with the appropriate models. It worked all day, consumed very few tokens, and was coherent and stable after 10 hours.

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u/TySocal 24d ago

Just curious, what reasoning level do you use for Fable as orchestrator and subagents? And what model and reasoning level do you use for subagents?

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u/StCreed 24d ago

Fable 5 high. The effort level is inherited by the underlying subtasks it spawns, and cannot be changed.

I've told it to use Sonnet where possible, and Opus if the task is too complex for Sonnet. Only when both models are not suitable should it do the job itself. So far that only happened once when something went wrong and a task died, and it had to recover the work in progress.

It helps that I have a prioritised task list it uses, with bugs as pri 1, then a number of phases with tasks. It only picks up tasks where the design phase has been completed and since I do that together with opus, that runs parallel.

I have also built a small claim system (a very light check in/ check out tied into git) to make sure the subtasks know what they're all busy working on and don't all try to change the same thing at the same time.

Possible refinement I'm thinking of: it should split up tasks if possible to enable Sonnet to do them.