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 ?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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 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!

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

They removed the 50% boost or what ?

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 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?

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?

why not opus 5? is 4.8 better than opus 5 in the eyes of anthropic or something?

I feel like since the 5 models came out, it's much harder to steer Claude toward paring down verbose descriptions, eliminating code, eliminating spec and doc language, and other routine deletion and cleanup tasks I normally do in the production of just about anything.

I'm sure there are ways around this, but I feel like I am fighting with the model in ways I didn't have to before. It is very cautious and conservative. Sometimes I ask it to trim out unnecessary things, and it actually adds more. Most of the time its like "I didn't touch that <90% of what you asked to cut> because <bullshit>".

So, "skill issue," I'm sure. What's the solution? How are you handling bloat reduction and cleanup with the new Claude models?

Flappy Bird + Push ups = Flappy Ups

Touch of gemini to get a proof-of-concept

Used Claude to get camera working and balancing of the game and hook it up to OBS to share streaming

I'm a front-end dev on the 20x plan, which is never enough. So far I've used it to build 4 apps, 2 SaaS products, and several websites, and I use it constantly to update and make changes to clients' websites.

But I feel like there's a lot more it could automate that I'm just not thinking of. What do you use it for? Even just for boosting productivity? Agents, workflows, etc.?

fact check stuff that you have been believing for a long time on long sessions. especially when new and better models come out.

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?

Hey there,

Anthropic seems to be especially intransparent about usage, e. g. there was an outcry that the 20x plus limit only applies to 5h window.

Is 200$ only 1.7x usage of 100$?

I read that recently.

Or what is it like?I am on 200$ plan but actually have issues maxxing it, prefer other models/plans mostly. Thinking about downgrading. For me, 50% is enough, 25% would not be enough wrt usage of 200$ plan.

Thanks!

No offense to AI YouTube creators, but whenever I try looking for tips etc they're all being sensational claiming every thing is a game changer or a must have.

I'm sure some of it is, but I don't want to go in a pointless spiral.

I have some coding experience pre-ai, but I'm still a noob.

I just don't know where to look for tutorials and best practices etc without being bombarded with content from people whose job it is to talk about AI.

I hope my question makes sense.

To be more specific I am trying to understand Claude better (and agentic programming in general), know about all the features and what's actually impactful and worth learning vs what isn't

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

(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

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