project-ops-template

Keep the Fable state after Fable is gone.

Claude Fable 5 — the top judgment tier — sunsets for subscription use on 2026-07-07. The point of this repo is to capture that judgment as portable doctrine: a rules layer that guides a mid-tier model (Opus, Sonnet-class, even Haiku-class) into operating at the Fable level — knowing when to delegate, when to escalate, when to stop and ask, how to verify without lying to itself, and how the rules themselves get safely revised over time.

You lose the model. You keep the operating discipline that made it good. That transfer — top-tier judgment → concrete, executable rules a lesser model can run — is the whole idea, and it's why the rules are written concrete-to-the-point-of-executable, every one with a decision test and worked examples.

Works with Claude Code, or any harness built around a CLAUDE.md-style entry file plus a subagent/dispatch mechanism.

Why this one, and not a prompt-generated template

This is not a set of rules an LLM was asked to draft in one pass and never ran. It is the operating manual of an actual long-running multi-agent deployment, extracted, sanitized, and open-sourced.

The concrete difference: after the first full version was written, the strongest model available in that deployment was handed the eight-step command loop and told to run it, for real, against a real task — not to review it, to use it. It came back and, in its own words, patched three concrete gaps the desk-review pass had missed (a role-assignment ambiguity, a missing "worker lane" for delegated subtasks, and a fuzzy test for telling a genuine limitation from an excuse). That's the v1.1 revision baked into these files. The rules have also since been the actual dispatch backbone for a real cross-machine deployment and ongoing multi-agent collaboration — every worked example in ops/00-command-loop.md and ops/50-diagnosis.md is a dated, real incident with the identifying details removed, not a hypothetical.

Put simply: most templates are a blueprint. This one is a floor plan traced from a house people actually live in — the floorboards that creak are marked, because someone found them by stepping on them.

What's in the box

project-ops-template/
├── README.md                  ← this file (safe to delete after deployment)
├── CLAUDE.md.template         ← a lean, routing-only CLA