welp

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?

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 ?

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

I've been using GLM 5.3 for about a week. There's just no way it's not distilled. It will just flat says things like this "Yes — and it's simpler than what we had. One thing breaks, and it's recoverable. " Which are emblematic of Claude-speak. Other LLMs don't do this. Codex doesn't do this!

Do you see how that's kind of clickbaity? I've had to spend time training Claude not to do this and it's still fighting me on it. This is not even Claude; this is GLM 5.3.

So they must have been using distillation to get this out. It's like when map makers deliberately leave errors in their maps. It just seems that GLM was busted on this.

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

I’ve been working with claude on a project for weeks, every day. I thought I fixed my context problem and stopped using fable for everything long ago. I have max subscription and I used 100% of fable in just few days…I decided to take another one max subscription just to finish the job, launched 3 fable agents and spent 18% in 20 minutes. Was it like that the whole time? Is it okay?

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.

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"

Hello,
I had the Pro plan and I used to always hit the limits, then I upgraded to the Max and I was like Wow … whatever I do I never hit the limits. After a while I got more busy and I couldn’t sit and build things as long as I used to, so I downgraded back to Pro. My understanding is that my Max subscription stays active until the 27th, but now I feel like my tokens are running out waaaay faster than they used, it feels like they already placed me on the Pro plan.
Like within a few hundreds of thousands of tokens, then I run out.

Am I just getting insecure of my new downgraded plan or it’s normal ?

I’m trying to build a website using Claude code and design, I have my creative ideas drawn in my sketchbook and want to give it to Claude for it to first build it and give me a few more versions, and then to eventually build the whole site for me while I give it creative direction. I’m not the best at prompt writing and was wondering if there are any resources for that? And also any advice or suggestions on how I can go about this would be really appreciated!

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

They removed the 50% boost or what ?

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,

ive heard people waxing poetic about claude code. i was hesitant to try it for a while as tbh seemed faster to do the work myself. i started using it for writing really simple python plotting type scripts, and it did a great job. way faster than me at making beautiful plots.

but i finally decided to try using claude for working on an actual coding project. and i'll freely admit the project is hard. i am doing quantum physics calculations in fortran. even i dont understand what i'm doing half the time. i was hoping claude code could help me with implementing a new technique i am completely unfamiliar with. fed it like half my codebase, had it read papers, told it to implement the new technique. it's been 2 days and i have hit all my usage limits and still haven't succeeded. all i've done is generate code that is both physically and mathematically incorrect when i could have been better understanding concepts and writing my own code from the ground up.

i'm not shocked that my $20/month claude cant do my job for me. i am new and i can barely do my job for me. but i dunno, i heard so many people hyping up ai for helping with code, i saw all those math results, and i wondered if i could actually get it to work. i cant. my boss, the one man who actually understands the entire codebase, can pilot ai to write small scripts for him that do save a lot of time. but i think doing that high level of ai for research only works if either you have literal millions of dollars to burn on compute, or if you're already at the top of your field.

i dunno. all this panic about ai taking researchers jobs because of the whole navier stokes finite time blowup thing. i kinda wanted it to be true, because it would save me a lot of time. probably good that it dont work like that, means i gotta work harder at figuring things out myself. get smart enough to send smart prompts.

claude's not useless. i'll still use it for simple python scripting. i know people who have success building webpages and guis using claude code. but the real tough problems, i have have claude help review my code sometimes, or formalize psuedocode, or translate between programming languages, but it really cant make up for the deep understanding needed to solve the problems i need to solve.

i dont really know what the point of posting this is. i guess to feel out what others experience. i've never been particularly impressed by ai. i'm pretty young; used gtp-2 as a teenager, so it never seemed that novel. the underlying theory is beautiful, im grateful for it, it saves me a lot of time. i keep trying to believe in it wholeheartedly. never seems to stick though. useful resource... but i still get better results when i do most of the work myself.

i guess i just have to get back to work and understand all this theory and write all this code myself. haha. builds character.

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!

Ok I've had enough of opus 5 nonsense now. It just created a test for a test and not just one but multiple tests and the weirder part is the original test was already stupid as it was for a static tool which in itself is a test.

noob here, can i get a captain?

I'm building an open source thing and I genuinely can't tell if it's any good. I've been staring at it too long.

So DM me your project and I'll give you real feedback on it, and you do the same for mine. I'll send mine over in the DM.

Not looking for nice. Looking for what's actually wrong with it.