I am seeing a lot of posts comparing Fable to Astra. Or Fable to Opus. And they are all either Benchmark-style, or very subjective. I’m thinking: this is impossible to compare. Reading that and all the complaints on people hitting their limits tells me they use Claude very differently from me. So here’s what I do, what works for me and is the intuitive way for me (and an insane productivity boost). I’m not one-shotting anything, Claude is a colleague I am working with. My sessions are discussions, which are interrupted by implementing or testing something. I am generally calling the shots and am the senior in the conversation, knowledge-wise, in my field of expertise, but for general programming stuff and looking up basic things, Claude is much better than me. So, I’m talking all day with my colleague, in multiple parallel sessions. Some sessions have hours-long runs where we discuss results afterwards, some are fast-paced discussions with short turns. When a context gets too full or a major beat in the conversation is done (which might occur at 200k context, usually 300-500k, sometimes a bit beyond that), I’m asking Claude to checkpoint this, record all open todos, next steps, decisions taken and major findings, so it knows what’s going on after a /clear, which I then do. I am doing that in 5-10 parallel sessions, usually, all on Fable or Opus. I’m not hitting 5-hour limits or weekly limits (I might hit the weekly Fable limit if I go all Fable, but I usually have a couple Opus sessions in the mix). Why didn’t I try Codex yet? Because they didn’t have a reasonable rc solution, and their context was too limited. They now have an experimental one that feels kind of comparable to Claude‘s, and Astra context is 1M. For me, these two points what make Astra viable for me, Sol wasn’t even viable to try because of the limited context… Can I think of a reasonable test to see whether Fable or Astra is better for me? No, I don’t see any way to that… The only thing I can test now is whether Astra is feasible as a colleague. That’s what I’m doing, I’m giving it a few lower-stakes session, and go for my usual workflow. First impressions are it has a similar speed in responses to fable, maybe a little quicker, and a different conversation style, but fine. Most likely, they are both viable to work with, and the time it takes to figure out which is better for what is longer than the time till the next major model is released… submitted by /u/yldf
Originally posted by u/yldf on r/ClaudeCode