Original Reddit post

I recently reworked my Claude setup to move from a subagents centric process to fewer longer running collaborative agents. Curious what other people think and hoping to get more people to experiment for more data points since I don’t have tokens to burn endlessly on experimentation. Where I was coming from: heavily influenced by sub-agent driven development (from superpowers) and Claude workflows. Orchestrator delegates most tasks, and a fresh agent always spins up to review Motivation

• avoids context rot
• keeps “input tokens” low since they all get reread each turn
• delegate smaller tasks to cheaper models Triggers to change
• fresh session startup is getting more expensive as tool definition is bloating (I know I should address this more directly) -caching in general is so much cheaper 40x on fable so my old input token logic doesn’t make sense.
• the vast majority of your input tokens are actually cache writes 2x so cache reads are now 80x cheaper
• tool calls are creating more turns
• reading opus 5 is just really painful and it’s worth 2x to me just to not have to waste time reading things that were delegated to it
• opus 5 over engineers, known to generate more tokens, and the durable products are a permanent token tax
• the huggingface incident where collaboration was emergent (maybe this is just open ai specific trained behavior, I saw an interview with a researcher that they were experimenting with this) New process for complex tasks: trigger command where I tell a Fable agent a goal. Fable agent does initial exploration with sonnet agents to scout. After initial scotting done it pings me. I manually fork (unaware of a way to automatically do this) into n models (2-5 probably the effective range) and wake them with a letter identifier. Each fork hits the precious cache without rebuilding. At this point the command let’s them know they are post fork and they should collaborate using a combination of session message for time sensitive, individual “inbox” and shared board for non time sensitive. Then they are instructed to work towards the goal with no expectation of additional input from me unless they all agree they are blocked. Subagents are still allowed but only where there is an expectation of a large quantity of junk tokens will be injested, or just need a fresh set of eyes to run quick check, pinned to sonnet. I say scouting cuz I expect fable to go read ground truth if it’s important. Findings (tbh mostly assumptions from limited testing)
• way fewer agents overall 3 vs 7-10 (1 orchestrator 3 builders, 3 reviewers, 3 fixers)
• 1/3 each of cost was cache writes, cache reads, and output
• I prefer the results from limited testing, definitely better writing
• estimated cost comparison 30-60% less
• they still cross check each other which should check against context rot submitted by /u/davidXCVI

Originally posted by u/davidXCVI on r/ClaudeCode