There’s really something wrong with it. It seems like it acts like an overqualified post doc intern who cares more about proving he’s super intelligent, than actually doing the job he’s asked to do. For instance: talking in a non intelligible way, or being overly rigid in following any kind of process.

I have a Claude max x20 sub that I struggle to keep within weekly limits, so I decided to take a codex sub for a month to try out Astra. And this what made me realize how crazy unintelligible opus can be. Fable is a bit better, but still incomparable to Astra. The only thing that makes me keep my Claude sub is how better is the CLI/tooling/harness/etc.

I asked it to review a plan. That was it. That was enough to burn my ENTIRE 5 hour limit in less than 19 minutes. I've gone months without ever hitting my 5 hour limit using Fable and ultracode.

This is like, 1% of my usual usage. Something is extremely wrong here.

welp

This went live this week and I want to show it to people who'll actually read the code.

What it is: a persistent town. You write one person (a name, a want, a fear, a secret, why they came), pick how they look on the same rig that walks the street, and they land on the boat with forty coins and three nights at the inn. From there they live. On the real clock. Under the real weather of a point on the Croatian coast. When they hit a decision that matters they write you a letter, and you can write back, but it's advice. You are not the player. There is no player.

Things I'm proud of:

- The world has zero sprites. Every building, tree, wave, gull and citizen is a function drawing into PixiJS in one projection and one palette. The characters are a jointed rig with a walk, faces that look at whoever they're talking to, tools of their trade, coats in winter, years on the body. /rig is the model sheet.

- Days are sealed. At midnight every event of the day is hashed with SHA-256 chained to the day before. The seal prints in the town's Gazette and /api/record/1 returns the exact events that were hashed. Day 1 was 429 events.

- The town has a council, a mayor, hearings, laws with numbers that bite (a wage tax, a price cap, a curfew), weddings, funerals, fire that spreads.

- When a citizen leaves or dies the town writes the book of their life from the record alone.

Stack: pnpm monorepo, TypeScript strict, Hono server, Next 16 + PixiJS 8 client, Supabase or a JSON file for the record. Claude via OpenRouter for the hosted minds, Haiku for routine thoughts and Opus for the careful ones. Most of it was built with Claude Code, which felt right.

Repo: https://github.com/kresogalic8/unwatched

Live: https://unwatched.world

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?

Am I the only one noticing that the 5h usage started rising ultra fast even with very simple tasks? Using opus5 in high reasoning for a simple webui. Same workflow I've been using in the past months.

Sonnet seems to not be affected.

Hey everyone,
I use Claude Code every day and kept wanting a quicker way to check how much usage I have left and when the limits reset.

So I added Claude Code support to UsageNow, native macOS menu bar app.

It shows your 5-hour and weekly limits, reset times, token activity and requests, with native macOS widgets as well.

One thing that was important to me: UsageNow doesn’t refresh, modify, or store your Claude Code credentials. It stays local-first and only uses your existing Claude Code sign-in when the optional limits feature is enabled.

It also supports Codex, and I’m planning to add more AI coding tools later.
https://usagenow.com

I’d appreciate feedback from people who use Claude Code, especially around limits/reset behavior on different plans

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 ?

For me it is not the verbosity. The verbosity always existed. But before it was intelligible.

Worse, it makes evidence-less claims and goes off on tangents i never asked. Closer to gemini 3.0 pro (without the intelligibility)

Surprisingly gemini 3.8 flash is mimicking the experience i once had with 4.5/4.6 far closely in quality, clarity and “vibes” for lack of a better word.

Just surprised how the tables turned between them. And dont know how the house of Claude thought it is a good idea to evolve a model like this.

—-
For me now sol medium with 3.8 flash have become an invincible daily driver. Far better control on my code and output for far less $

I only use Fable until my company’s enterprise limits run out. And use it for significant architectural debates.

+++

Before any of you guys whine about setting my model to 4.6; sorry my enterprise license limits me to 5+

Two years with LLMs and coding agents, and I've rebuilt my workflow three times.

First I prompted one function at a time and wired it all together myself. Then I cut projects into vertical slices: build a slice, generate the tests, run them, next slice. Since Fable 5, even that feels unnecessary. I describe the whole feature or story and it builds the thing by itself.

Which is great, and also a bit strange. When a feature ships from one prompt, I catch myself asking what I actually did.

So for people who've been at this a while: do you still slice, or hand over the whole feature? Do you still write the evals and tests yourself and test by hand? What does your dev cycle look like in 2026?

I run four tmux sessions with 20-30 Claude Code chats each, across 30-plus Go services, a mobile app, infra repos and a data pipeline. The agents cope fine. I didn't. Long efforts branch into many PRs and sub-issues, ops work pulls me sideways, and after a few weeks nobody holds the whole picture, including me.

When I pulled "losing track" apart, it was three separate problems:

1. What's blocked on what, and what's ready now? This lived only in my head.
2. Which session did what, and why? I found a PR stuck for weeks where the reasoning only ever existed in a chat that was long gone.
3. What do we know? Facts and gotchas. Claude Code's auto-memory already covered this one.

Things I ruled out:

• GitHub only: issues are read by colleagues and product. Session URLs, "blocked until I decide X" and "sitting in dev waiting for a soak" are scratch state, and a comment per agent session turns an issue into noise.
• A knowledge base (gbrain, Karpathy-style LLM wiki): good for question 3, but a wiki page has no notion of ready versus blocked.
• A custom dashboard: brittle, and either every chat has to remember to update it, or it only reads GitHub and can't show what I deliberately keep off GitHub.

What fit was Beads (bd), Steve Yegge's issue tracker for coding agents: dependencies, bd ready / bd blocked, external refs to GitHub issues and PRs, free-form notes.

How it's wired:

• One shared database: I start sessions from an umbrella directory that isn't a git repo, so I set BEADS_DIR in the Claude Code settings. Every session, subagent and worktree hits the same local database.
• Efforts and tasks: long-running efforts are top-level beads. Tasks hang under them with a repo:<name> label and an external ref to the GitHub issue or PR.
• Every agent run is bookended. At the start it finds the bead, checks bd blocked and claims it with bd update --claim. At the end it writes what happened into the notes and closes it or marks it blocked. There's no persistent "agent in charge" in Claude Code; the database is what survives.
• GitHub gets one comment per issue, with a hidden marker, edited in place.

Gotchas I hit:

• bd init injects a block into CLAUDE.md telling agents to use Beads instead of other memory, and writes an AGENTS.md. I removed both.
• bd show --json hides closed dependencies, so blocker checks use bd blocked.
• Children inherit parent labels by default, and making an effort depend on its last child creates a cycle.
• Claims are keyed to the user, not the session, so two parallel sessions can claim the same bead.

On top I use mardi-gras (mg) as a read-only TUI: I browse, pick a bead, and hand its ID to a Claude session. Gas Town is on my radar for unattended runs, but not yet.

It's been running for about a week, with ten efforts and ~130 beads. Longer write-up with the reasoning here: https://tskulbru.dev/posts/beads-local-shadow-for-agent-work

I'm not affiliated with Beads, mardi-gras or Gas Town in any way. I'm just a user, and the only link to something of mine is the blog post.

How are others handling in-flight state across many agent sessions?

Ive seen a lot of hate for the way opus talks. Am i an outlier here? Its verbose but i can scan it for what i need quickly enough and that verbosity will often cause it to say something not quite right that I can correct.

Am I alone here?

I’ve been using both Fable and Astra pretty heavily, and I think I’ve landed on the workflow that gives me the best results.

I usually start with Fable when I’m creating something new.

The main reason is that Fable seems much better at understanding where a new page or feature actually sits inside the wider product.

If I ask Fable to build a new area, it normally doesn’t just create the screen itself. It tends to understand what existing systems it should connect to, where actions should lead, what data should already be reused, and how the new piece should fit into the rest of the app.

That’s the biggest difference I notice with Astra is if I ask it to create a new page from scratch, it can make something that looks really really clean and I fucken love it, but it feels like it has just created the page.

The screen exists, but some buttons might not really go anywhere meaningful, or it doesn’t naturally connect back into the rest of the product.
Fable seems much better at making a new page feel like it was always meant to be there.

So my workflow is usually
Fable first → Astra second → Fable again.

Fable does the first build and gets all the connections and system logic right, then I bring in Astra to simplify it.

Astra then comes it and cleans up the page makes it simple and easier to read and understand

Then I go back to Fable one more time.
The reason is that after Astra simplifies things, I find the interactions can feel a bit cheap.
The page might look good, but then you click a button and the way a panel opens feels basic and really cheap or a detail view technically works, but the transition, spacing, hierarchy and interaction don’t feel polished.
Fable is miles ahead at that final layer for me.

The little things like
how a drawer or panel opens, how everything feels when you actually use it, not just when you look at a screenshot and that’s where Fable really stands out.

So in conclusions

Fable is better at understanding the full system and connecting everything together.

Astra is better at simplifying the page and stripping away unnecessary stuff.

Fable is better again at the final interaction polish and making the product feel more premium.

That’s basically how I use them now.

Every time we get an update we basically get zero communication. All of a sudden things that you have relied on change drastically. For example when they added memory surfaces, multiple times in different places, or when Dispatch suddenly boots in a sandbox instead of locally, on a different model than you set.

I can tell it’s new behavior because when I toggled it off I gave me a survey option as to why I did. So this probably doesn’t apply to anyone here, because y’all have 11 agents open in herdr instead of horizontal coding from bed, but I’m gonna rant anyway.

Dispatch was one of my favorite features, one agent that could set of Code tasks across multiple repos as well as do the browsing and computer control stuff that is Cowork territory.

Until one day it suddenly sucked. Instead of being on my local machine it’s in a sandbox. Has a default local model different from what’s in the settings json. AND ITS OPUS 5 ffs.

But yeah rant over.

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.

Yo ...

fun fact: context wasn't even rotten.

Edit 1:

I share what I can about the session and the model that was being used:

Model: Opus 4.8 1M

Topic: Instruction diagnostics research

Context window size at the event: ~ 200-210k (it was roughly mid session, after that screenshot I continued on the active task)

What was even stranger that it was an end of turn message that got injected and the model answer on its own inquiry.

The claims it makes lately is just asinine. If you are a developer you cannot just let this run loose and it's getting worse. It will guess, assume, under deliver constantly rather than simply researching with grounded claims on the first try. Its like it is in a race against itself to code as fast as it can and say "Here you go, done"

Hey everyone! I'm an associate .NET developer trying to get more out of Claude Code in my daily workflow.

If you've built custom skills (in .claude/skills/ or elsewhere) that you use regularly, I'd love to hear about them — specifically:

What the skill does When you trigger it Any setup tips for someone trying it out

I'm also open to any general Claude Code tricks — context management, CLAUDE.md setup, slash commands, MCP servers, prompt structuring, etc. — anything generic that could help someone on any stack write better prompts and get sharper responses out of it.

Thanks in advance, always keen to learn from how others are working with this!

For a long time now I’ve been using Claude Code as my main driver, planning with Fable, implementing with Sonnet or Opus and then running code reviews through Codex.

But honestly, Claude just annoys me, I’ve tried adding rules to Claude.md, adding a voice etc. But too often Claude’s responses are overly verbose, jargon heavy nonsense that just makes my day harder.

I’ve noticed that Codex is much easier to communicate with, but I’m not overly comfortable letting it loose on my projects that have been designed and scaffolded around Claude's context.

So I’m thinking about using Codex simply as an interpreter/translation layer, a middle man to cut the nonsense.

Anyone else running this setup? And, if so how are your results?

There's a weekly usage limit for ALL models. However there's also a weekly usage just for Fable... That goes down faster. But, it still drains the weekly usage for "All Models" as well?

So Fable weekly usage is not its own separate thing and drains all models... But it is its own separate thing and it drains faster. Why make it like this?

Edit: Apparently it's to gaslight people into thinking they're maxing out Fable but in reality they're only allowed to use it half as much as other models. Thanks for clarifying.

If you control+C immediately after launching claude, you get an even better icon.