Comment by hombre_fatal
5 days ago
My job these days is listening to Opus 4.8 (max effort) and Codex 5.5 (max effort) talk back and forth, particularly to generate/review/revise plan files.
Fable 5 has been a major improvement in high-level reasoning, like taking a plan file that has been optimized to the point where neither Opus nor Codex can find anything to change about it (neither in direction nor impl-detail), and Fable 5 will find high-level directional simplifications and pivots, or it will consider the best pivots itself and explain why it rejected them in favor of the plan's direction.
It's so expensive though. A single review of a plan file with Fable 5 (xhigh effort) will use 2-3% of my hourly limit on a $200/mo plan.
I think my new workflow is to generate the initial plan with Opus 4.8 (max effort), get Fable 5 (xhigh) to review it for directional feedback, then start the Opus<->Codex revision loop from there.
How do you arrive at that split? Real world is more like senior high level planning, implementation to juniors, review senior. Does this not translate?
Ideally I'd have Fable 5 make the plan, but creating a concrete plan is the most token-expensive part since the agent has to do the most research.
Fable 5 is 2x the cost per token of Opus 4.8, and it's much less work to review a plan than generate one.