fable-foreman

Fable Foreman

Your strongest model shouldn't be swinging the hammer.

Built in public by DontSleepOnAI — the story behind this skill (including the five-round adversarial review where OpenAI's newest model tore apart the first draft) lives there.

Fable Foreman turns whichever frontier-class Claude model leads your session into a team lead: it plans, routes each task to the cheapest worker that clears the quality bar — Claude subagents or OpenAI Codex CLI workers, auto-detected — and, in full orchestration mode, refuses to accept meaningful changes until a blind, fresh-context verifier reproduces the evidence. (Environments without subagents get an honest reduced-assurance mode that says so.)

No dated model IDs in routing policy. No configuration files. No enforcement scripts. One skill, three agent roles, and a set of rules good enough that a frontier model actually follows them.

"Fable" is where it started, not what it needs. The foreman seat is a capability class, so any frontier-class Claude runs the skill identically — Opus leads it exactly as Fable does, with the same routing tree, gates, and verification contract. That holds whether an Opus session invokes the skill directly or a Fable session falls back to Opus mid-run; the skill re-probes its own seat and carries on rather than routing off a stale identity.

Why

Anthropic's own engineering shows both sides of the ledger. Their multi-agent research system writeup found an orchestrator-plus-cheaper-subagents design strongly outperformed single agents — an Opus lead with Sonnet workers, exactly this skill's shape — while consuming roughly 15x the tokens of a single chat, which is why they conclude multi-agent work only pays for high-value tasks. Anthropic's own cost guidance likewise recommends cheaper-tier teammates under a stronger lead as the default for multi-agent work. And the community has receipts for what happens without discipline — runaway-subagent cost stories are a genre of their own on every AI-coding forum, which is exactly why this skill bounds crew sizes, retries, and spend announcements the way it does.

The difference between those two outcomes is not orchestration machinery — it's routing judgment and verification discipline. That's what this skill installs.

What it does

1. Probes the job site — what model is the session running, can it spawn agents, is a working Codex CLI present: binary on PATH, then codex login status for auth and billing mode, with a version-tolerant credential-file fallback if that subcommand ever changes — and no billable call, not even the functional echo ok, until you've consented to spending your OpenAI credits. The probe is cached, but expires when the session model changes — a fallback, a quota event, or a /model switch triggers a re-probe rather than letting the foreman route off an identity it no longer has.
2. Routes by capability class, not model name — FRONTIER (judgment), WORKHORSE (implementation), FAST (scanning). Classes resolve at runtime to stable aliases and to whatever Codex tiers your account offers today. Frontier is a class, so any top-tier Claude leads identically, and frontier-class workers are dispatchable when parallel judgment work genuinely needs them. New model releases require zero skill updates.
3. Delegates with self-contained tickets — 7 core sections plus a mandatory write-set fence on implementation work, file paths instead of pasted context, gradeable acceptance criteria.
4. Collects four-status reports — DONE / DONE_WITH_CONCERNS / NEEDS_CONTEXT / BLOCKED — with a bounded escalation ladder: two failures at a seat, then escalate one seat or take over. Never a third identical retry.
5. Verifies like it trusts no one — the project's real build/test command first (free), then a blind verifier that gets the original task verbatim and none of the worker's reasoning. Required for every accepted change except single-file zero-logic edits. Cross-family when possible: Claude verifies Codex work and vice versa. When the verifier resolves to the same model as the lead, it says so — "blind-verified (same model, independent context)" — instead of implying independence it didn't obtain.
6. Respects your budget both directions — sequential dispatch by default (prompt-cache warmth), announced fan-outs, and the degradation rule: under quota pressure it steps seats down visibly and prefers stopping cleanly over silently shipping degraded work. Economics never lowers the quality bar.

Install

Claude Code — recommended. Paste this into a Claude Code session:

Install this skill globally on my machine: https://github.com/olsenbrands/fable-foreman

Claude clones this repo and installs two things — both are required: