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/architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews, Codex builds

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Re: /architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews, Codex builds

#3

Post by colechristensen »

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.

Re: /architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews, Codex builds

#4

Post by mpalmer »

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.

Re: /architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews, Codex builds

#9

Post by malshe »

colechristensen wrote: post #3

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.

I had a similar experience. So far Fable has been a game changer, at least for the work I used it for. Having said that, I think its writing is definitely worse than GPT 5.5. Ethan Mollick also observed the same. He called it more "Claudy." It generates worse academic prose than other frontier models.

Re: /architect: Reduce Fable tokens by 80%, Fable orchestrates/reviews, Codex builds

#10

Post by nsingh2 »

colechristensen wrote: post #3

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.

Could you provide some details, if possible, like what model & thinking effort, what kinds of tasks? I used to swap between Claude Code and Codex often, and these days use Codex more because of the usage limits. Wondering if I should go to Claude for a month, I get a strange FOMO when I read vague comments like this.

The one major difference I noticed is that the GPT models are more analytical (e.g. better at mathematical analysis, code review) vs Claude models tend to write more straight forward code. Besides that I don't really see any significant differences.

There are a few gotchas with swapping, like being careful with AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md naming (Claude Code only recognizes CLAUDE.md, and I think Codex only works with AGENTS.md), and updating skill files to match the tool.

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