Fable Baton

fable-baton 🪄

Fable 5 holds the baton. The orchestra plays.

A Claude Code plugin that makes Fable 5 the orchestrator. Fable keeps the judgment, tiered subagents on Opus, Sonnet and Haiku do the labor. Install once and every new session in every repo starts this way.

Why · Benchmark · How it works · What you'll see · Install · Day-to-day · Alternatives

Why

- Fable time is precious. It is the strongest model on a Claude subscription and 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.
- No more 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.

Benchmark

Numbers from a small controlled test, run 2026-07-13 on Claude Code 2.1.197 with plugin v1.3.0. The project was a zero dependency Node.js library with a test suite. Three tasks: fix two seeded bugs, implement a feature from a spec in TODO.md, and review the codebase for bugs. Each task ran headless via claude -p, twice with the plugin off and twice with it on, same session model (Fable 5) in both. Success was checked from outside the session: the test suite had to pass (for the feature task against hidden tests the session never saw) and the review had to find both seeded bugs. All 12 runs passed.

Values are per run averages over the two reps. Read the table honestly. Total API cost comes out about the same and sometimes higher, because orchestration adds coordination on top of the work. What changes…