Claude Fable 5 Spanking Claude Opus 4.8 — AI skill for Claude Code

SKILL: Claude FABLE 5 spanking Claude OPUS 4.8

A Claude Code skill that makes the expensive orchestrator model read and judge while cheaper subagents do all the writing.

The name is the whole idea. Fable 5 is the main loop, the frontier model billed per token to metered credits. It never drafts a line. It decomposes the work, writes the spec, spawns Claude Opus 4.8 subagents to do the labor, then grades what comes back. The orchestrator cracks the whip; Opus does the digging, drafting, and sweeping. Hence the title.

The problem

There is a billing asymmetry between the two models in play. The main-loop frontier model bills its output tokens to metered usage credits. Subagent models bill to a flat subscription plan allowance. Drafting is output-heavy: writing code, docs, and tests burns exactly the tokens that cost the most. Verification is read-heavy: it consumes input, not expensive output. So the expensive model should read and judge, and never write.

The model policy

model	role	billing
main loop (e.g. Fable 5)	decompose, spec, review, validate, decide, talk to the user	metered credits, minimize output
opus-4.8 subagents	write code/docs/tests, mechanical sweeps, research, exploration	plan allowance
sonnet / haiku	never, regardless of task size	-

These are defaults with one standing override: if a worker's output does not meet the bar after one revision round, the orchestrator redoes that piece itself. Judge the output, not the price tag. Escalating costs less than shipping mediocre work.

How it works

The orchestrator keeps only four things for itself: task decomposition and the self-contained spec each worker receives, verification and validation of returned work, decisions and everything the user reads, and tiny surgical edits where writing a spec would cost more than the edit. Workers do everything else, first drafts of user-facing copy included; the orchestrator reviews for taste before it ships.