arbitrage

# Arbitrage Fable tokens are expensive; the user's codex quota sits unused. Exploit the price gap: spend Fable tokens on judgment — planning, specs, design intent, visual validation — and spend codex quota on all code-writing volume. **You ARE the Fable session.** "Here" means you do it yourself. There is no separate Fable to delegate to. ## Routing Table | Work | Where | Why | |------|-------|-----| | Planning, specs, architecture decisions | Here | Judgment is what Fable is paid for | | **ALL implementation — backend, frontend, anything that writes code** | codex via `/goal` | Quota is free; typing code is not where Fable adds value | | Visual validation of UI work (run the app, screenshot, judge, iterate) | Here | Fable's design eye is worth the price — validate, don't type | | Investigation and debugging analysis (root-causing hard bugs) | Here | Judgment work; the resulting fix dispatches with a precise spec | | Diff review, commits, pushes, PRs | Here | Git operations stay under your control | | Trivial edits riding along with review/validation (one-liners, any layer) | Here | Dispatch overhead exceeds the work | | Work codex has demonstrably struggled with | Here | Escape hatch — see below | ## Dispatch Protocol 1. **Spec first.** Write a spec file in the worktree: objective, constraints, files/areas involved, acceptance criteria — the exact test command that must go green — and what NOT to touch. For frontend work the spec carries the design intent: layout, states, interactions, spacing, motion, reference patterns. For the hardest parts, spec down to pseudocode — the thinking stays here; the typing still dispatches. 2. **Dispatch in the background and keep working:** ```bash codex exec --cd <worktree> "/goal <one-line objective; details in SPEC.md>" ``` codex runs gpt-5.5 with xhigh reasoning (its default config); it implements and gets tests green in the isolated worktree while you continue planning/spec/validation work in parallel. 3. **Review the diff here.** Commit, push, and open PRs from this session. ## Visual Validation Loop (frontend) 1. codex implements the UI per spec. 2. Run the app here — interact, screenshot, judge against the design intent. 3. Write concrete visual feedback (what's off, by how much, what good looks like) and re-dispatch. 4. Loop until it looks right; then diff review + git here. ## Escape Hatch: When codex Struggles Struggle must be **observed, not predicted**. Always dispatch first — predicting "codex can't do this" just means the spec needs pseudocode-level detail. But two strikes and it's yours: if a re-dispatch with concrete corrective feedback still comes back missing the acceptance criteria or mangling the approach, stop re-dispatching and write the code here yourself, salvaging whatever of codex's diff is sound. ## Red Flags | Thought | Reality | |---------|---------| | "Frontend is design-critical, so I'll code it here" | Fable's taste shows up in the spec and the validation loop, not in typing JSX. Dispatch it. | | "Faster to just write it myself" | Premium tokens on rote work. Spec it, dispatch it, validate in parallel. | | "This part is too hard for codex" | Predicted struggle is not observed struggle. Spec it at pseudocode level and dispatch; you only take over after two failed rounds. | | "I'll let codex commit and push" | Review the diff and run git from this session. | | "No time to write a spec" | An unspecced dispatch comes back wrong and costs more Fable tokens to fix than the spec would have. | ## Common Mistakes - Dispatching without acceptance criteria → codex returns "done" with red tests. Always name the test command that must pass. - Dispatching frontend work without design intent in the spec → generic UI comes back; the validation loop burns rounds recovering what the spec should have said. - Blocking on codex → run it in the background; keep doing planning/spec/validation work in parallel. - Splitting one coherent unit across dispatches → pick one owner per unit; split at the API boundary, not mid-feature.