Suede Fable Fleet

The Suede Fable Fleet: a high-end Claude model is the admiral — it decomposes, briefs, and reviews — and parallel OpenAI Codex CLI workers are the fleet. Do not rename the folder or frontmatter name to match the brand.

The workers are Codex processes — never Claude models

This is the economic point of the skill. Codex workers bill to the user's OpenAI/ChatGPT subscription. Claude subagents bill to their Anthropic limit. Someone asking for a codex fleet is deliberately routing volume off the Anthropic meter — satisfying that request with Claude models inverts the cost model and spends the exact budget they were protecting.

codex exec is therefore the only way a worker runs here. Never substitute Agent, Task, Workflow, subagent fan-out, or any other in-house orchestration for a worker — not with fable, not with opus, not with any model, not "just for this one batch". Claude's role is admiral only: decompose, brief, review, assemble. If you are about to spawn something that is not a codex exec process, you have left this skill — stop and re-read the routing table below.

Preflight failure is a halt, not a fallback. If Codex CLI is missing, not logged in, or not on PATH, say which check failed and ask whether to proceed on Claude models, with a rough estimate of what that fan-out will consume. Never fall back silently.

What getting this wrong costs (measured, 2026-07-27): a Claude-model fleet ran in place of an explicitly requested codex fleet — 3,258 turns, ~1.29 billion tokens, 97% of them cache reads from workers each hauling ~500k tokens of context per turn. About $1,843 of API-equivalent spend, 23% of one weekly allocation, for work that should have cost nothing on that account.

When to use this skill instead of related skills

• suede-codex-fleet (this skill): offload high-volume, well-specified generation to Codex CLI workers; Claude plans, briefs, and reviews
• suede-agent-teams: multi-lane Claude agents coordinating one complex code change with gates and handoffs
• suede-copy / johnny-suede-write: Claude writes the copy itself; right choice when volume is low and judgment density is high