I think this is almost a tautology, to the point that I'm surprised more people don't realize it.

If you ask the AI to do more work, it uses more tokens. If you do more of the work instead, fewer tokens are used.

I've been looking at Matt Pocock's skills recently, and they're very useful. But they use tokens. You can do that work yourself without the token usage, and just have the AI do the coding, or you can tell the AI to do everything and pay the cost.

And you can scale it down even further, and reduce the AI to a glorified code completion tool, and use way fewer tokens. But it's not going to speed up your work nearly as much.

For now, finding the right balance is important. In the future, I think things will eventually shift to the point that we just hand most of it to the AI and let it go without worrying about tokens.

I don’t think subagents are the problem. Uncontrolled fan-out is. Separate contexts and independent analysis are extremely useful for larger tasks. In my experience, Pro is far too limited for sustained programming, although that probably depends a lot on the kind of engineering work you do.

Fable is great, but overkill for most tasks. Sonnet and Opus are already good enough for the execution work. I find Fable much more useful for planning, orchestration, advising, and judgment.