I have a stage-gated workflow that prioritizes “premium” token efficiency (Fable.) and getting the most out of my subscription services. (Which boils down to Fable running carefully prompted deepseek-flash agent teams that defer back to the managing agent for any design decisions in most work.) As part of that workflow the manager uses cheap reconnaissance agents to burn their tokens in order to build relevant repo context, instead of the managing model’s. I’ve been doing this since they released Opus and it occurred to me that most of my pre-implementation phase token use was going right into the garbage bin with file reads that have to be done to find the relevant code, but are very wasteful.

There’s an added benefit that the manager’s focus on strategy and task decomposition before actually handling the user’s prompted task directly seems to be a very good way to interact with Claude’s Fable safeguards, and I haven’t had any refusals doing this.

And while I haven’t ran any numbers, I can get orders of magnitude more out of my claude subscription doing this, especially with deepseek-v4-flash being as good as it is for as cheap as it is.