Fable Director

🎬 fable-director

  

**Keeps Claude Code from spending your quota on work the top model didn't need to do.** It makes your agent declare what a job should cost before it delegates, routes the cheap parts to cheap executors, and blocks the turn when spend runs away — with quality as a constraint, never part of the trade.

**The honest price:** the always-on checks are a premium on small work — **~5% to ~20%** on quick one-off tasks (shape-dependent, N small), and up to **+47%** on easy self-contained bug fixes (measured on SWE-bench, where the discipline had nothing to protect). If your work is mostly small and easy, this plugin is not for you.

Quickstart

claude plugin marketplace add frsorrentino/fable-director
claude plugin install fable-director@pixelfarm --scope user

Then two one-off steps:

1. Copy fable-director/playbook-template.md to ~/.claude/delega-playbook.md — the playbook lives outside the plugin so updates never touch it.
2. Enable the statusline: /fable-director:statusline, then restart Claude Code.

From the first session the plugin **enables its own auto-update** (announced in-session, reversible: set `"autoUpdate": false` under `extraKnownMarketplaces.pixelfarm` in `settings.json`, and that choice is respected forever). No-CLI alternative and zip migration: **[ONBOARDING.md](ONBOARDING.md)**. Manual hook merge and edge cases: **[INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md)**.

What you get

• Same cost, better result on the jobs that eat your quota — on big reading jobs tokens are neutral and quality is consistently higher (N=6/5); ~20% fewer tokens on repetitive mechanical work.
• The job you run every week stops costing you — repeatable work is promoted to a script; from the second run it's close to free.
• **Your agent can't quietly