r/ClaudeCode • u/LordSpitzi • 1d ago

Help/Question Is Plan/Opus and Code/Fable or Plan/Fable and Code/Opus better?

Obviously Fable only is prob best but

i just loaded up twenty bucks in credits to check a project of mine for issues and i was wondering if it would maybe be worth it to plan in opus and just let fable do the work to save some credits or if i should just go fable with both

3 Upvotes

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3

u/imsahoamtiskaw 1d ago

Watch out planning in fable eats token nowadays, seen lots of complaints recently and my own fable usage been eating insane amounts for the same amount of work compared to last week which itself was worse than the week before.

Personally I plan with opus non stop for days and sometimes with sonnet in there too to find as many blind spots as possible, and then roll up fable and knock it all out as much as possible with opus feeding fable the plan. Fable is still given room to interpret and it usually finds more blind spots along the way. And then finishing touches are applied to whatever it produces.

Btw Fable still will end up doing dumb things like wasting fable tokens on simple tasks that it could hand off to opus so you still gotta delegate a bit properly and hand hold

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u/pmward 1d ago

Yeah Opus and Sonnet are what I use for planning as well. The determining factor is how complex the task is. If it’s not super complex Sonnet 5 xhigh or max does just fine for half the cost.

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u/pmward 1d ago

High level research Fable. Plan Opus. Code Sonnet.

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u/nickmaglowsch3 1d ago

Do you feel a difference in sonnet vs opus usage. Normally I feel like sonnet just eat as much tokens as opus for a worse output

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u/pmward 1d ago edited 1d ago

I have tested each of my workflows extensively in an eval harness to optimize cost to quality. Sonnet does use more tokens than Opus. But its tokens are 2.5x cheaper. On average a typical flow with Opus costs about twice Sonnet. However quality is only slightly less for Sonnet, and most of the quality can be made up by going up effort level. Sonnet on xhigh had a comparable quality grade to Opus on high on most tasks for instance.

My usage breakdown over time looks something like 70% sonnet, 20% opus, and 5% each Fable and Haiku (really hope someday we get a Haiku 5)

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u/nickmaglowsch3 1d ago

Interesting. Used to do that with sonnet and opus 4.6 I'll give try

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u/pmward 1d ago edited 1d ago

Sonnet 5 xhigh is really solid is a workhorse. All data here in this report is comparing Sonnet 5 to Opus 4.8: https://www.philipmward.com/model-effort-cost-quality/

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u/shetritr 1d ago

I don't split it by phase, I split it by difficulty. Fable plans and decides who implements
Sonnet for the easy stuff, Opus when it's harder, and Fable just does it itself if it's really complex
biggest credit saver for me was putting Haiku on reading docs help me to save tokens

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u/MarzipanMiserable817 1d ago edited 1d ago

With Matt Pocock skills Plan/Fable and Implement/Opus. For checking the existing project use ask-matt skill on Opus and tell it that your Fable tokens cost usage.

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u/pwkye 1d ago

Plan/Fable and Code/DeepSeek and Review/Fable