The curiosity is inefficient though. So many times I have to stop the agent and tell it to just fucking write the code and try compiling it. Otherwise it will fill its entire context tracing through the program logic to derive from the code itself whether the thing it is about to do would work. It completely fails to notice it can just… try.

Fable and sub agents are two different things. There are many situations for which Fable is great, but Fable doesn't have to run in a sub agent. You can use it for your main agent and that works fine.

Or are you saying my sub agents burned so many tokens because they were all using Fable, whereas my main agent could do the same job with a lesser model?

But how is that better than a single agent searching those "angles" sequentially?

Unless they are orthogonal they most likely require similar context anyway so multiple sub agent is just wasteful.

doesnt intelligence involve knowing where to start and what to read and not just throwing everything in the bag.

im on local only AI and subagents are only valuable when they avoid polluting the context with extraneous file reads and parallel exploration when fixes are linear.

as OP is on about, subagents burn tokens because they arnt a deterministic intelligent gatherer but like pooluring water into a maze hoping the exit will illuminate.