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 the most capable Claude model on your account 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.

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.
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. 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.
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 (plugin):

/plugin marketplace add olsenbrands/fable-foreman
/plugin install fable-foreman@fable-foreman

Claude Code (manual): clone this repo, copy skills/fable-foreman into ~/.claude/skills/ and agents/*.md into ~/.claude/agents/.

Claude Desktop / claude.ai: package the skill folder as a ZIP and upload it under Settings → Customize → Skills (requires code execution enabled; see Anthropic's current docs for plan availability):

cd skills && zip -r fable-foreman-skill.zip fable-foreman/

Releases on this repo will also attach a pre-built fable-foreman-skill.zip. Without the Agent tool, the skill runs in discipline mode — separate plan/execute/self-review passes, ledger, and status contracts on your single conversation model. That's honest same-model self-review, weaker than full mode; the skill says so rather than pretending otherwise.

Recommended: add one line to your CLAUDE.md so the skill fires reliably (the fables project measured description-based triggering alone at only ~50–60% recall):

For any multi-file or multi-stage task, use the fable-foreman skill.

What it needs