alt Hacker News/architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews, Codex builds
Comments
I actually just started doing this by having Fable roleplay as Jeff Dean and to use Codex as Sanjay driving the implementation and have them go back and forth. Works really well and it’s cool to see AI pair program
Fool me once. Fool me twice. Fool me thirty three times and here we are trying lucky number 34.
yes I'm using Fable to inspect, generate plan and architectural docs then using Gemini to implement then have Fable review, find bugs. saving lots of usage.
Fable will do this itself, by spawning Opus/Sonnet subagents to do easy work.
Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, simply by not using it!
> I am fairly convinced this is the shape serious agent work keeps converging toward.
"this" being "plan with expensive model, implement with cheap model".
Anyone who follows HN would be hard-pressed to disagree; this architecture is re-invented twice monthly.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/vibecodinglife/posts/1946207... https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/10628 https://build5nines.com/stop-burning-premium-requests-how-to...
> Not because it is aesthetically pleasing. Because every other shape eventually runs into the same boring failures: context rot, self-grading, goalpost drift, and merge chaos.
Actual failure isn't boring. But struggling through a generated software project that celebrates its own genius and doesn't have a single self-critical or genuinely reflective thing to say...at least watching paint dry I might get giddy off the fumes.
I'm not interested in critiquing the project itself, either, you'll just run that through a model, too.
Reducing token usage is this year's "one weird trick". It doesn't make sense on the face of it.
Even if one discovered something that millions (billions?) of dollars of AI compute and the best statisticians in the world was not able to find via exhaustive research, domain search and training... what do you think are the chances this won't be folded into the next update of every model, making the rigmarole moot?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and technology-shattering innovations in AI are not know to come from a markdown.
[flagged]
Last night I switched back to Codex for a minute having burned through my tokens for the week with Fable and oh boy I had a terrible experience. Running in circles over simple problems (which I ended up solving myself, like a peasant) and running "terraform apply" several times despite several instructions all over the place to never do that. The performance difference was stark.
Reduce fable token usage even more by not using it. What a clever idea, op! Wow.
DESIGN.md:
> Each rule below is enforced mechanically by the skill, not left to vibes.
> R1. Repo docs are the memory; not in HANDOFF.md = didn't happen
SKILL.md:
> Not in docs/HANDOFF.md = didn't happen. Refuse to judge results that exist only in conversation or builder chat output.
"Mechnical enforcement" just means "prompting the LLM a bit extra" these days? It (still) amazes me how much effort and tokens we expend on what could and should be a two line script...