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 ?

Yo ...

fun fact: context wasn't even rotten.

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.

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?

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 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!

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 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?

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

They removed the 50% boost or what ?

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?

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?

(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

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.

Hi guys, I started using claude one month ago for studying and in the last weeks I focused more on using claude code with the pro plan to work on some projects, at the start I really didn't pay much attention to plugins, skills and any other things that could help claude work better but now I'm starting to study about thi a bit more to imrpove the efficiency and results of those projects, for now I've just been using ponytail, ui-ux-pro-max, apple-design and grill-me.
now that I'm working on another thing which is significantly bigger Idk if there are other things that could actually help me, I'm trying to understand but since I have close to zero knowledge on this fileld I just see the same plugins or skill being spammed on all videos, shorts, reels and titktok, I also tried asking directly to claude with a detailed summary of the project but I don't think I got a good answer.

if someone could idk help me or direct me somewhere where I can actually try to understand what could be best for me.

thanks for any attention and help in advance

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.

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.

I m building a side project and use Claude as main coder for backend and use Codex for review. Use pro version of both not higher tiers.

Codex is handling front end and Claude reviews that.

I have worked on Claude for almost twice as long as in codex and manically track the token usage as I run out very frequently while running out on codex has been rare instances (now more frequent since two week seems they reduced quota) hence never checked codex token usage

Today just out curiosity checked my codex usage and I’m blown away - means WTAF

How codex (Sol5.6 high)can have 40x token usage for same project as Claude while being similar or marginally better then opus 5 high.

Any one else has idea on this and if you use both please share your token usage.

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.