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# Claude Clue #33: Let Your AI Phone a Smarter Friend
- URL: https://christophermoravec.com/claude-clues/claude-clue-33-advisor-phone-a-friend/
- Published: 2026-08-05T01:05:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-05T01:10:04.000Z
- Description: Remember "Phone a Friend" in Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It's like that, but with lower stakes.
- Author: Christopher Moravec
- Tags: Claude Clues

Claude Code has an experimental feature called the advisor. You pair your daily-driver model with a stronger one, and Claude consults it at the moments that decide how the whole task goes. It tends to call before committing to a plan, when the same error keeps coming back, and before declaring the job done. The advisor reads the full conversation and returns guidance that your main model applies before continuing. Run `/advisor opus` in a session and you're set. Claude decides when to dial \[the friend\].

Roscoe runs it the way Anthropic intended, with Sonnet doing the work and Opus a phone call away for planning and troubleshooting. This seems to make a big difference. Anthropic benchmarked the pair (Sonnet with an Opus advisor), and it scored higher on SWE-bench than Sonnet alone while costing 12% less per task. 

For now, this lives in the terminal and the API only; Cowork and Claude Desktop don't have it, which makes it a real difference between the [two doors from Clue #32](https://christophermoravec.com/claude-clues/claude-clue-32-cowork-vs-claude-code/). And the advisor must be at least as capable as your main model, so the call always goes up, never down. Right now, though, Fable isn't available as an advisor. I find this a little strange, since this pattern of advising or planning is used by other systems too, and I would expect Fable to be a great advisor.

*One Claude drafted this. Another was on call, just in case.* 

*Thanks to Tim "Roscoe" Rawson, whose daily driver has Opus on speed dial.*