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fable-baton 🪄

CI License: MIT

Fable 5 holds the baton. The orchestra plays.

A Claude Code plugin that makes Fable 5 the orchestrator. Fable keeps the judgment: intent, architecture, decomposition, tradeoffs, final review. Tiered subagents on Opus, Sonnet and Haiku do the labor. Install once and every new session in every repo starts this way.

Why

Fable 5 is the strongest model you can get on a Claude subscription. It is also the most expensive one to burn on grep runs and boilerplate. fable-baton routes each piece of work to the cheapest tier that can do it well, so you can keep Fable 5 as your daily model.

There is a second goal: stopping the mid-session switcheroo. When Fable time runs dry, Opus quietly takes over your session. With fable-baton, Fable spends its tokens on judgment only, Opus does the heavy work below it as a subagent, and Fable stays the one holding the context. The tiers are Opus, Sonnet and Haiku today. Later this should open up to other models and structures.

How it works

Four pieces, all shipped by the plugin:

  1. Four tiered agents, each pinned to a model:

    Agent Model Owns
    scout Haiku Discovery, reading files/logs, summaries, simple checks
    executor Sonnet Scoped implementation, tests, routine edits, local refactors
    architect Opus Complex implementation, deep debugging, high-risk work, reviewing cheaper agents
    verifier Haiku Evidence checks: tests green, diff matches plan, no regressions

  2. An orchestration policy, injected into every new session by a SessionStart hook. The policy tells Fable what to keep (judgment) and what to route down (labor), with anti-waste rules: no pointless fan-out, focused context per agent, and no delegation for genuinely trivial single steps.

  3. Enforcement. A one-time policy is not enough. Models drift back to doing everything inline as a session goes on. We watched it happen in real sessions. So the plugin works in three layers: the policy at session start, a short reminder on every prompt (UserPromptSubmit hook), and a PostToolUse hook that counts consecutive inline tool calls and injects a delegation notice once a streak crosses the threshold (default 4, set with FABLE_BATON_TRIPWIRE, resets whenever an agent is used). The model can still ignore a notice. But ignoring a fresh instruction mid-streak is much harder than forgetting something from page one.

  4. A setup skill (baton-setup) that configures your default model to best (Fable 5, with Opus fallback) - the one thing a plugin can't set by itself.

High-risk areas (auth, billing, migrations, concurrency, public APIs, …) get special handling: Fable decides, architect executes or reviews, verifier confirms with evidence.

Security-focused sessions (scans, audits, vulnerability triage) send even the cheap hands-on steps to the agents from the start. Fable stays at planning and synthesis. That is the right split anyway, and it avoids interruptions from the top model's intentionally broad safeguards on routine security output.

Install

In any Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add realgarit/fable-baton
/plugin install fable-baton@fable-baton

Then ask Claude to "run baton-setup" - it sets model: "best" in your ~/.claude/settings.json (with your approval and a backup) and verifies the install. Restart your session and you're done.

Requirements

  • Claude Code with plugin support
  • A subscription or API access that includes Fable 5 (the best model alias falls back to the latest Opus otherwise - the orchestration still works, just with Opus conducting)

Day-to-day

Nothing. That's the point - every new chat, in any repo, starts with the policy loaded and the agents available. Fable delegates on its own. If you want to check it's active, ask: "which subagent types are available?" - you should see scout, executor, architect, and verifier. You can also watch the plugin work: after a few inline tool calls in a row you will see a [fable-baton] notice in the session telling the model to delegate.

To skip orchestration for a session, just say so ("don't delegate in this session") - the policy defers to your instructions.

What you'll see

Every prompt gets a short delegation reminder, and when the model does too much inline work in a row, the counter steps in:

[fable-baton] 4 consecutive inline tool calls without delegating. Main session: this block
belongs to an agent (scout for discovery, executor for edits) - delegate the remainder now.

That notice comes from a deterministic PostToolUse hook, and the CI suite proves it fires at exactly the threshold.

Uninstall

/plugin uninstall fable-baton

Then, if you want your old default model back, restore model in ~/.claude/settings.json from the settings.json.baton-backup-* file that baton-setup created.

Alternatives

Worth knowing before you pick this:

  • fable-advisor keeps day-to-day work on other vendors' models and calls Fable at decision points. Choose it for multi-vendor routing. fable-baton keeps Fable conducting the whole session, so your context never leaves it.
  • claude-code-workflow-orchestration ships eight agents and adaptive nudges. Choose it for complex workflow graphs.
  • fable5-orchestrator is close in spirit, with a requirements ledger and per-workflow verification. fable-baton stays smaller on purpose: four agents, one policy, three enforcement layers, zero config.

Pick fable-baton when you want install-and-go and Fable staying in charge.

License

MIT