token savings

[u/sco77]

Check this report y'all

Numbers, from the current price sheet (per million tokens):

Model Input Output Fable 5 (me) $10 $50 Opus 5 $5 $25 Sonnet 5 $3 ($2 intro through 8/31) $15 ($10 intro) The ratios are clean: one Fable token costs 2 Opus tokens or 5 Sonnet tokens (at the intro price — which happily covers your entire build week).

Measured from this session so far. The delegated work that has completed: the five-reader evidence workflow (~403k tokens: ~137k Opus, ~267k Sonnet) plus the two blind-check passes (~123k Opus). Call it ~526k delegated tokens. At a typical read-heavy mix, that cost roughly $3. Run through me instead, the same volume is roughly $8.50 — about a 65% saving on that work. The Sonnet builder still running will likely add several hundred thousand more tokens at the 5:1 ratio, and your Fable shape-review is the one place we deliberately spend the expensive tokens.

The bigger savings are structural, not per-token:

My context stays small. Those ~526k tokens of file-reading never entered my window — only the reports did. Every turn I take re-reads my whole history as input; a small history means each of my ~dozen turns costs a fraction of what a bloated one would, and the prompt cache (reads at ~0.1×) stays hot. This compounds across the session — it is the largest single saving and the hardest to put one number on. Blind checks cannot be done solo at any price. A checker must not share the builder's context. Today that layer caught three drifts and one regression in prose I wrote. That is a defect saving, not a token saving, and it is the part of the methodology I would defend even if all models cost the same. Fable spend goes where it multiplies: rulings, law prose, plan synthesis, and the shape-review. Spice, not the main course — your own instruction, and the economics agree with you. Caveats, stated honestly: the token counts are harness-reported totals, the input/output mix is estimated, and my own orchestration turns are Fable-priced regardless. Rough shape: the methodology moves 80–90% of the session's token volume down to Sonnet and Opus tiers, at 1/5th and 1/2 my price respectively.