> "You do your work in Projects, then talk to your project’s coordinator, which then delegates work to threads when needed."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you skipped a layer: Projects use a coordinator → worker → threads pattern.

This is the reason I only tried Projects once and then went back to my previous way of working: Threads in the current UI aren't easy to track or to watch over. Apparently if you want to know what they're doing you're supposed to ask your coordinator. That's crazyville.

It may not be "correct" but I like to use Fable as a coordinator/orchestrator/planner/assistant and validator. I chat with it constantly. I've banned it from doing any implementation or research work on its own. Instead it always fires off Opus subagents to do the work and then it validates their work when they're done and then updates me.

This way, the Fable thread is always available for me to chat with, plan, brainstorm, answer questions, etc. Yes, just like a Project's coordinator, but I always know what it's doing and workers are just one step away. The way the Projects are set up seems way more hands-off.

Working this way in the Desktop GUI, I can easily see all the subagents and subtasks that are running and I can drop in and check out what they're doing/thinking/etc. with a single click. This has helped numerous times as they can get stuck, or I can see that I've given the wrong instructions, or something else. I also have the main Fable session set timers so it can monitor for stuck agents as well (waiting for a test suite to return that never does, for example). I don't have anywhere near the same control and visibility into threads.

Projects instead defaults to a less advanced coordinator/orchestrator (I know you can change it but the point is that the system is designed for a dumber coordinator), then the smarter worker subagents start, but I don't get to talk to them directly unless I hunt them down, and then they fire off threads which I have NO visibility at all into and have no idea what they're doing.

You guys at Anthropic need to think about us poor schmucks that don't have unlimited tokens to work with. I can't have threads out there sucking up tokens/usage allowance only to find out later that they were wasting their time.