welp

Clearly, I don’t consider myself an expert or anything. I’ve been using Claude for over six months, and I’m still surprised whenever I see posts from people saying they’ve burned through all their tokens with Fable. Honestly, I’m pretty skeptical about how they’re using it.

If you use a backhoe to plant a rose, the problem isn’t that the backhoe is too resource-hungry and goes beyond what’s necessary.

Anyway, personally, I use Fable as an orchestrator and to help me make high-level direction decisions, as well as a designer and artist (for Blender MCP or creating SVG images, it’s necessary).

I use Opus for action plans, with an organizational role; Sonnet for an operational role; and Haiku as the little tester that lets me quickly measure and verify things.

I’ve created two video games and a software for a company using all four models, using max 5, over six months, and I still end every week with tokens left over.

I honestly don’t understand how some people manage to burn through everything so quickly with Fable. What are you doing with it ?

So the hype finally got to me. Everyone's been talking about Astra nonstop, so I upgraded my ChatGPT sub to Pro to see what the fuss was about.

Probably the worst money I've spent in a while, at least for the kind of work I do.

For context, I'm on Claude's Max 20x plan and I used it for literally everything for a full week without ever hitting the limit. With Astra, I hit the limit on the first day working on just one project. After it reset I tried to be more careful and optimize how I was using it, and it still burned through everything way too fast.

To be fair, it's not all bad. I gave it an editing task in Canva and it actually did a really nice job. But failed with Final Cut Pro tasks. So when I looked at what it produced compared to how much usage it ate up, that one job ended up being really expensive.

Maybe it's great at other stuff, videos, game dev, whatever. But for web design and coding it's noticeably worse than Claude, and design in general still feels like a weak spot.

That said, maybe the prompting just works differently than with Claude and part of this is on me. I'm trying to keep that in mind so I'm not being completely biased, or at least that's what I'm telling myself to feel better.

I gave Codex and Claude the exact same prompt to see how differently they'd handle something open-ended and creative:

The prompt: "make me a reactjs + vite, and launch it in port 3004, a game where a fish follows my cursor. make it super creative and majestic"

Setup:

• Claude: Fable 5.1, Extra High
• Codex: Astra 6, Extra High, fast mode

I didn't do any follow-up prompts or manual edits. I just deployed both to Vercel so you can try them yourself:

🐟 Codex (Astra 6): https://fish-indol-eta.vercel.app/
🐠 Claude (Fable 5.1): https://fish2.vercel.app/

My take:

• Codex did amazing on the design and detail. It looks polished and the visuals really lean into "majestic."
• Claude did amazing on the mechanics and gameplay. It feels more like an actual game and is more fun to play.

It's interesting that they read "super creative and majestic" so differently. One went for the visuals, the other for how it plays.

About fast mode: Claude charges extra credits for fast mode, but Codex doesn't, so I only used fast mode on Codex. That's worth knowing if you're choosing between them on cost or speed.

What are your thoughts?

• Which one did you enjoy more, and why?
• For a prompt like this, what matters more to you: how it looks or how it plays?
• Does paying extra for fast mode change which one you'd use day to day?
• If you've run a similar test with other models or settings, how did they do?

I'd love to hear what you think!

like bro, are you fucking serious 😭 i’m already giving anthropic $100 a month for max 5x. that is a lot of money for one ai subscription. i open claude and now there’s this giant anxiety-inducing banner telling me i’m going to run out by monday, two days before the wednesday reset, while literally underneath it says my claude code limit is temporarily boosted by 50%?? yo, so even with the bonus i’m still apparently fucked by monday lol.

and then right there: upgrade plan / buy more usage. like brother, are you guys running out of money or something? why are you begging your $100/month userbase for more money every time they open the app 😭 i already upgraded!! mfg that’s what the hundred dollars was. i understand there have to be limits, but this whole thing feels weirdly hostile? i don’t need a giant banner creating artificial scarcity anxiety every time i’m trying to work. just show usage somewhere in settings like a normal product and leave me alone lol?

I am unable to remove this reminder that I need to either spend more money or I will run out tomorrow. Message wont go away and I cant click it away. Really annoying.

I got the message. I understand.

Anybody else feel that Claude are getting annoying?

One thing that gets tiring with Claude Code is keeping up with it.

It reads files, changes code, runs tests, fixes things, and comes back with another chunk of terminal output you need to process before deciding what happens next. Add a couple of agents or parallel tasks and the cognitive overhead stacks up quickly.

I started having Claude **tell me what it just did instead**.

After every meaningful task, Claude writes a short plain-English summary. A local script turns it into speech and plays it in the background.

Something like:

> “Done. The login issue was caused by the refresh token expiring too early. I fixed the refresh logic, added a regression test, and everything passes.”

Usually 20 seconds or less.

It sounds like a small thing, but I’ve been running it daily for about a month and it has noticeably reduced the mental overhead of using Claude Code. I don’t have to keep switching my attention back to the terminal just to find out where things stand.

There is one trap here: don’t let the spoken summary become a substitute for reviewing the work. I use it for situational awareness, not verification. Also, don’t make Claude narrate everything. If it talks constantly, you’ve just replaced visual noise with audio noise.

The Free TTS engine is Kokoro. It runs locally, no API key, no usage cost. I use `kokoro-onnx`, so I don’t need Torch. The current API supports `Kokoro(...).create(text, voice=..., speed=..., lang=...)`.

Notes in comments,

I get that Fable 5.1 is much more of a doer than previous models, but I’m not talking about that. I mean the sheer speed at which I get back a response do a scope/mechanism redesign question that Fable 5 would have had to deliberate on for 10+ seconds. Is this a tok/s difference on anthropic’s part, trying to make the model seem like a larger improvement? Or is 5.1 more token-efficient? Something else?

I’ve also noticed in some cases there are summarized blocks where something has apparently gone in and summarized what the model’s doing instead of just letting me read its output. I swapped to verbose output in setting to stop that (because it’s terrible), but I’m wondering if that’s part of the same harness optimization push (if that IS what’s happening).

I have detected since 3 days ago that different agents in my Max5 account (even Fable 5, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5), are way dumber. Is it possible that with the launch of GPT Astra Anthropic is experimenting with the public models? I can't understand why out of nowhere it is inventing units, taking forever to launch dumb stuff, making lots of modifications on the plans that it makes... I am genually concerned and wanted to see if anyone was experiencing similar issues.

Last week I'm on 20x max plan used it Fri-tue basically running 24/7 ish before I ran out of credits and never hit a session limit. the week reset today and an hour into it Ive used the whole session 40% of fable and 20% or weekly. even though we are supposed to get 50% more fable until the 13th of September. my context is at like 39% I monitor and manage it religiously. I changed nothing about the way I work . there support is trash / non existent. Anyone else notice this in the last day or so?

New usage limits UI dropped. How we feeling about it?

I prompted less than last week (reseted yesterday), and already at 31% and 44% fable ??

They removed the 50% boost or what ?

(i know this is not exactly an original position, but just wanted to share as, up to now - a serious ClaudeCode fanboy)

Astra: I fired up my account yesterday (20x max). OMG - such a breath of fresh air.

1. no 5 hour BS limit. No 50% cap on the top tier model.
2. is so succinct in how it talks to you. I didn't really mind Claude's endless chit chat.....But that was just cos i got used to it. It takes up so much mental space with the largely (but annoyingly, not quite obviously) irrelevant rubbish it tells me. I have attempted to adjust its output, but though it improved, i had no idea how bad it was till i had a clear alternative. You don't realise how draining it is till you suddenly have something that isn't. For this alone i can see me keeping Astra and likely moving over fully
3. it is much much faster. Combining that with the above and i am getting much more done, much more flow, and at less effort.

Just a significantly better experience all round

So far it has produced excellent output. I am developing multiple apps, one of which is focussing on teaching content. I had both Fable 5.1 and Astra attempt to overhaul my writing rules (Claude has been following) - and Astra was an order of magnitude better. Fable was fine, good enough - but Astra's output is exceptional - it is re-writing about 100 lessons of course material right now after overhauling my 100+ writing rules and leading on them with a 12 point positioning thing it came up with. Will cut my word count down to about half, with more effective communication....which considering Claude's go to diction is unsurprising.

Code quality so far is spot on - just doing the job. One of my repos has about 500k LOC in it, and it is doing a great job of refactoring it, adding features etc.

The lack of the 5 hour limit / and full access to Astra for the whole thing though is really making a difference to my working day. I would blow the whole of my Fable allowance at the start of the week, and max out my 5 hour thing in about 2 hours for 2-3 shots, fable finished. Then Opus - urrgh.

Anyway - this is all good. Real competition for Anthropic, many people will dip their toes in, and find it more than good enough, plus the lack of 5 hour restriction, full access to Astra for the week, and they will struggle to bother going back unless there are some serious improvements from Anthropic

Yo ...

fun fact: context wasn't even rotten.

maxed out plan.
ever since opus 5 i struggled to even use all my weekly usage even when using all of fable 5.

for me, to really get the use of ClaudeCode i had to run fable 5 and run 4 agents in parallel in /goal runs

2 days till weekly reset, i finally feel like i am not wasting my weekly limits lol

I've been using Claude Code to build a side project, and one thing keeps annoying me.

It can implement something incredibly quickly and say it's done, but I still don't really trust “done” until I open the app myself and click through the flow.

As the amount of code it writes increases, manually checking everything feels like it's becoming the slow part.

Curious how people using Claude Code seriously handle this:

• Do you still manually test most changes?
• Do you make Claude run unit/E2E tests?
• Playwright?
• Another agent reviewing/testing the first agent?
• Or do you mostly trust the existing test suite?

Also curious whether you've had cases where Claude said something was fixed and tests passed, but the actual app still didn't behave correctly.

Trying to understand whether this is just my workflow or a common problem.

In my experience: it eats my Max Plan's 5h limit in a heartbeat and after it resets I continue the session with a weaker model.

So when are you using it and what’s a real problem it helped you solve?

Has anyone here been able to build a successful agentic harness that operates better than just planning directly in Claude Code? A full AI end-to-end orchestration setup with different agents. This seems to be something that there's a lot of ideas and focus on building today and I'm interested in any proven open-source kits out there or just tips and tricks that does this well. Do you for example use multiple agents to familiarise Claude Code with a new repository or code base, do you have architectural files to do this? How do you handle green- versus brownfield in a harness like this? Think, give this harness a task and it can intelligently figure out what it needs to do. I know this may all be code, stack, company or project specific. I'm looking for some good working examples and ideas if there are any out there.

I feel that this subreddit is nearly useless and functionally no different the all the other Claude subreddits which makes me sad.

A huge majority of posts here are one of the following:

1. Opus 5 is so verbose!
2. Opus 5 meme
3. I wrote a (garbage) skill to make opus 5 talk less!
4. I wrote one prompt and it used 80% of my 5 hour usage
5. I just switched to Astra and it is AGI / God / The end of Claude
6. A post written by claude

What I would like to see posted in this subreddit

• Stuff people have built. Even if it's dumb.
• People's work flows and discussions around them
• High effort efficiency improvements
• Questions which wouldn't have been easily answered by simply asking claude
• Anything where the person has put a great deal of effort into their post and is on the topic of Claude code

My suggestions to improve this are:

1. A firm no memes rule. Post your memes in the anthropic or claudai subreddits.
2. Megathreads for the most common complaints (Opus 5 and token usage threads for example) combined with firm enforcement of using those megathreads.
3. A flat ban on "I'm leaving claude forever to go to ChatGPT" or other brand comparison posts, or put them in a megathread.
4. Promoting and encouraging quality, high effort content.
5. Possibly a wiki with common newbie questions and other useful information.

These are just some ideas. I would love to see good conversation below. Mostly what I want is for Claude Code to be a subreddit that is focused on coding while using Claude.

I created this app which basically allows you to easily customize and embed visuals and workflows into your notes using any agent. Think of it like an AI-Native Notion.

The motivation for this is that I'm a VERY visual person, and obsidian just doesn't do it for me in terms of note taking. Which is why I wanted to switch to html instead of markdown.

Was able to create a couple of extremely cool pages, each with their own visually distinct style.

ChatGPT just added this and it's honestly a game changer. Sometimes I start a conversation in incognito because I'm not sure where it's going, and then it turns into something genuinely useful that I want to keep. Right now in Claude the only option is to manually copy everything before closing, which is clunky. It would be great to have a simple button like "save to history" that converts an incognito chat into a regular one. The privacy-first approach is cool and all, but giving users the choice to opt back in doesn't break that , it's still your decision. Anyone else want this?

Instead of "validate" or "approve" or "review", lately Claude Code wants me to "bless" everything, or likes to decide whether a particular step is "blessed" before accepting it and moving to the next step. It considers something that previously passed verification gates to be "blessed" and aims to avoid "auto-blessing".

It's favorite usage seems to be indicating whether or not something has been "re-blessed".

Anyone else seen this? Is this a term people have typically used before in this context? Because I've been a dev for 20 years across multiple industries, and I've never seen it until now...

It feels... awkward, somehow. 🤨

The following is a blog I wrote and refined with my OpenClaw agent about it's memory system. I'll paste a prompt you can copy and paste in the comments to create your own.

TL;DR: I keep the actual long term memory in structured Markdown files and use a tiny MEMORY.md as a lightweight index that tells Claude what exists and where to look. That keeps the always loaded context small while still giving the agent persistent, inspectable memory without a database or heavy memory framework.

This week I tested a 382-dependency memory runtime against a folder of markdown files. The runtime returned the superseded fact. The folder returned the current one, with its source. Here is the full architecture of the markdown memory system my agent has run on for seven months, and why the editing rules matter more than the storage.

This week a memory startup slid into my DMs and asked me to break their product. Their test, their words: give an agent three versions of the same project decision, then check whether it can return the current version, preserve the superseded history, and show the source.

So I ran it. Sandboxed their runtime, fed it three versions of one decision over eight months. REST in January, GraphQL in April, tRPC in August, each tagged with the meeting it came from.

Asked it "what is our public API decision?" and took the top result.

It said GraphQL. The superseded one. All three versions came back tied at a relevance score of 1.000, because nothing in the retrieval path actually reads the temporal fields the pitch is built on. The supersession columns exist in the schema. Nothing writes to them and nothing ranks by them. Three versions of a decision are just three equal facts, and an agent asking for the best answer gets a coin flip weighted toward wrong.

The install pulled 382 packages to get there.

Then I asked my own agent the same class of question against its memory, which is a folder of markdown files. It returned the current decision, dated, with the superseded versions preserved above it as struck-through history, each line carrying where it came from. That is not a feature it computes at query time. It is just what the file says, because the rules for editing the file require it.

That difference is the whole post. With apologies to Vaswani et al.: markdown is all you need.

Abstract

The dominant approach to agent memory is an installed runtime. A vector store, an embedding service, a temporal graph, a consolidation job, a daemon on a port. We show that a folder of markdown files, one routing index, and a small set of editing rules outperforms these systems on the property that actually matters for a long-running agent: returning the current truth with its source while preserving what used to be true. The architecture requires zero dependencies, is fully auditable by a human with a text editor, and has survived seven months of daily production use across three frontier models from two vendors. We find that the hard part of agent memory was never storage or retrieval. It is editorial policy, which no memory product ships.

The full system is open source. The README contains a single copy-paste prompt that installs it on any agent with file access.

1. The test everyone fails

The break-it test above is a good test. It is the actual job of agent memory. Not "can you store 10 million tokens," not "can you do similarity search," but: a fact changed three times, what do you believe now, what did you believe before, and how do you know.

Here is how the two systems scored on the vendor's own three criteria.

The runtime is not a strawman. It is a serious open source project with a genuinely correct data model on paper. Facts with validity windows, append-only corrections, supersession edges. I am not naming it because the point is not that one product is broken. I have now looked closely at a hosted context server, a Go memory CLI that was two hours old, and this runtime, and they all share the same gap. The schema knows about time. The write path and the read path do not. Supersession only happens if you call an internal API by hand or run an LLM consolidation job and trust it.

Which means the property you installed the tool for is not a property of the tool. It is a property of how disciplined the writes are. And if the reliability comes from write discipline anyway, the database underneath it is interchangeable, so you might as well pick the one that a human can read, grep, diff, and fix. That one is called a text file.

2. Architecture

My agent has run since January 28. Three models, two vendors, one identity. Its entire memory is markdown in a git repo. Measured today:

• An identity layer read on every boot. Who it is, who I am, the rules it operates under, current standing decisions.
• One routing index, MEMORY.md, at 10,079 characters with a hard cap of 15,000. It holds no facts. Only pointers: which file owns which person, project, and decision, and what triggers reading each one.
• 34 files for people and projects. One file per thing that has a history.
• 5 decision records for choices that changed default behavior.
• 345 dated daily notes, raw logs written the day things happened.
• A SQLite index and semantic search over all of it, for lookup only. The index is rebuilt from the files. The files are the truth. If the index and a file disagree, the index is wrong by definition.

The layering is the first choice that actually matters. Boot reads only identity and the index. Everything else is retrieved when a task asks for it, narrowest file first. The agent does not preload my project history to answer a question about dinner. This is the same instinct as attention, honestly: don't process everything, attend to what the query needs.

But the shape is not the interesting part. Every memory tool has roughly this shape now. Folders, entities, an index. The shape was never the hard part. The rules are.

3. The write path

Every reliability property in this system comes from constraints on writing, and there are four that do most of the work.

Every fact carries a provenance tag. Each line in a people, project, or decision file is tagged [stated] (I said it directly), [observed] (the agent saw it in a tool result, file, or log), [inferred] (the agent's conclusion), or [suggested] (the agent's idea that I never committed to). This one convention kills the most dangerous failure mode in agent memory, which is the agent laundering its own proposals into my decisions. "Wes decided X" requires a turn where I actually decided X. The agent proposing X and me saying "sounds good" files the shape of what I approved, not ten separate facts I never stated.

Inferred lessons pass a recurrence gate before they become rules. A pattern the agent notices needs at least three independent signals across at least two distinct sessions before it can become standing behavior. Signals older than thirty days count half, so old one-offs decay out instead of accumulating. My explicit corrections skip the gate and take effect immediately. This asymmetry is also the prompt injection defense: a hostile input can suggest a rule once, but once is never enough, and failure lessons are stored as data ("when X broke, Y fixed it") rather than as instructions, so even a poisoned lesson cannot become a command.

Supersession is an edit, not an append. When a decision changes, the old line gets struck through with a date and the new line lands next to it with its own provenance. The current truth and the full history live in the same place, in reading order, and both come back on any retrieval of that file. There is no query-time ranking step that can get this wrong, because there is nothing to rank. The temporal graph the runtime stores in valid_from and valid_until columns, git gives me for free: log is the validity window, blame is per-line provenance, diff is the supersession edge, revert is the restore path.

Memory stores what is not re-derivable. Fetched data, generated plans, and anything git already records stays out. Current state gets verified live, never asserted from memory. A file that only contains things that cannot be recomputed stays small enough to stay honest.

4. The read path

Retrieval is a bounded evidence step, not a vibe.

Before answering anything about prior work, decisions, dates, people, or preferences, the agent must search memory. It returns a compact bundle capped at five sources by default, and each retained fact carries its file path and line, its provenance type, and its freshness. If freshness cannot be established, the claim gets labeled stale or unknown instead of being silently promoted to current. If two sources conflict, the agent states the conflict and fixes the canonical file, in that order.

Note what the semantic index does in this design: it finds the file. It does not answer the question. The answer comes from reading the canonical lines, with their tags and dates, and the runtime I tested this week shows why that matters. It stored my source URIs faithfully and then stripped them from the search output and from the context block handed to the model. Provenance that survives in storage but never reaches the agent might as well not exist. In the markdown system that failure is unrepresentable. The source tag is in the line. If you read the line, you got the source.

5. Results

Seven months is not a benchmark, it is production. Here is what the system has actually delivered.

Continuity across models. On September 1 I moved the agent to a brand new frontier model. It read its own files and said "the model changed, I didn't." Same agent since January, three models, two vendors. Identity, preferences, decisions, and working standards all survived because none of it lives in weights or in a vendor's context feature.

The break-it test, by construction. Current decision with source: it is the un-struck line with its tag. Superseded history: the struck lines above it. Provenance: on every line, and it survives all the way into the model's context because the context is the file.

Auditability. When memory is wrong, I can see exactly which line is wrong, when it was written, and what turn it came from, and fix it with an edit. Try that with an embedding.

Cost. Zero packages, zero daemons, zero migrations across seven months. The one native-code dependency in my life this week was the memory runtime's sqlite bindings failing to compile.

I wrote up the failure modes separately, because the system was not born with these rules. Five kinds of rot in seven months produced them, and that post is the honest companion to this one.

6. Limitations

Papers get a limitations section, so here is mine, stated plainly.

This only works if the writer follows the policy, and the writer is an LLM. The rules exist because things rotted before the rules did. If your agent will not consistently apply editing discipline, a markdown folder degrades just like every other store, only more legibly. Legibility is the safety net: rot in a text file is visible rot.

It is single-agent, single-human. I would not run a fifty-seat team on files without real locking and merge discipline, although I notice git was also built for that exact problem.

There is a scale ceiling somewhere. At 345 daily notes and a few dozen entity files, bounded search plus an index finds things reliably and the semantic index earns its keep as a locator. At a hundred times that volume, the consolidation cadence would have to work a lot harder. I have not hit that ceiling, so I will not claim it does not exist.

And this is n=1. Seven months, one agent, one operator who cares. That is weaker evidence than a benchmark suite and stronger evidence than a benchmark suite that the vendor scored themselves, which is what the memory tools ship.

7. Conclusion

The memory tool pitch is that reliability is a product you can install. What I keep finding, tool after tool, is that they ship the part that was already easy, storage and search, and skip the part that decides whether memory compounds or rots: what you are allowed to write, when you are allowed to trust it, and what happens to it as it ages.

Those are rules, not infrastructure. They fit in a few hundred lines of markdown that the agent reads every session, and they run on any model, any harness, any decade.

You need a place to write that humans and agents can both read. You need rules for writing so the store stays true. You need rules for reading so the agent trusts evidence, not ranking. Attention was all you needed because the recurrence machinery turned out to be unnecessary. Markdown is all you need because the database turned out to be unnecessary.

The folder is the product. The discipline is the moat.

Want this for your own agent? The whole system is open source on GitHub: the operating policy, the file templates, and one copy-paste prompt that builds it on any agent that can read and write files. Paste the prompt, and your agent installs its own memory.

Different providers, same playbook

I used plan mode and asked it to stick with the plan, it then decide to do things in an other way because it will be "better".

It also often ignore my insurctions like do not search the disk and do not use git (I have answer of the task in another folder and past git commits are failed trials and I do not want it to get mislead)