It launches these tasks in the background. It became really good at it a couple of months ago, now it sets monitors on timer (not something I instructed, so I assumed it’s part of the system prompt for this kind of tasks) and then just wait for the next prompt, for the background process to be done, or for a monitor to trigger a checkup.
> and then just wait for the next prompt
A single session running for multiple hours is prohibitively expensive, as per Anthropic. Regardless of whether it just waits for a prompt or does something.
Prohibitively expensive is all relative. Pre-Fable, I was getting fine on the 5x plan for 1-2 concurrent long-running tasks plus interactive work (I do a lot of coding for work, but it is not my full work day). I don’t think a cache miss every hour on Opus hurts that much, even at 500-600k context. It would be nice if they got /clear working on remote-control.
Is the high expense coming from cache misses? If their workload does need to wait for a long time before it can continue, I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.
> Is the high expense coming from cache misses?
Yup. They can't keep your workload in cache forever, or they would run out of cache for users.
> I wonder would starting new sessions and having to re-read the contexts and results anyway be any cheaper.
Yes, that's what they recommend