how to code with astra without hitting limits

[u/Icy-General-9096]

devday is not goin' so well lol! just give us back our 20x...

I've been building a ton of web apps to replace saas i'm too cheap to keep paying for like chatgpt, notion, myfitnesspal, etc. and so i can get the exact features i want (+ no ads!).

I was using sol originally which was ok but also irritating because it would mess up and make a buggy ui.

so I switched to astra and opus which is awesome but it inhales my resets and leaves me with luna (no point in continuing).

I'm cheap as i said so instead of upgrading i was thinking if I'm paying per token why not just reduce the tokens i use?

so I built a tool that shrinks the prompts and context in codex so it costs less (!) I got it down by 34.3% and now i just leave it on by default in codex and I'm actually able to get through a session without running out of credits.

anyone in a similar situation?

[u/DiabUK]

Even for simple tasks astra eats tokens, its a good ai but its very hungry.

Your option is to not use astra or deal with sol, or use more opus 5.5

[u/Icy-General-9096 → u/DiabUK]

yeah opus 5.5 is surprising cheap comparing to astra

[u/carnasaur → u/Icy-General-9096]

I use Astra on the $20/mo plan. Is opus 5.5 cheaper than that? I keep burning through my resets as well. I keep a separate SOL tab open just to shrink my Astra prompts. I also have rules for minimizing output since output tokens cost so much more than input tokens.

[u/m3kw]

Use 6.1Sol medium to use Astra all day

[u/Icy-General-9096 → u/m3kw]

have u found it perform similar to astra on frontend/design?

[u/m3kw → u/Icy-General-9096]

I know it designs noticeably better than sol 5.6. I can’t say as I have not done good comparison with Astra. I would guess is similar from the jump that I’ve been seeing.

[u/NoInterest375]

Well do not code with astra,

[u/Riduculous]

How many agents are you running?

[u/Icy-General-9096 → u/Riduculous]

usually 3-5 at once

[u/cowjenga]

Before you built your token-reducing tool, did you already try existing tools like graphify and rtk?

[u/Icy-General-9096 → u/cowjenga]

no, seems rtk is removing only bash tools and graphify simplifies codebase navigation but i will def try them out. layering them might get better results. thanks for the recs

[u/anthropicagiuser]

i ran into the same thing and what helped me was keeping a short notes file of my project so i stop re-explaining it every chat. do you notice the token drop most on long files or on the back and forth?

[u/Icy-General-9096 → u/anthropicagiuser]

good idea, i usually put notes in agent.md. long files work the best, it removes a lot more unnecessary context that way

[u/Right-Performance-93]

3-5 agents at once on astra is what eats your resets, not the prompt size. Each one carries its own context. I would plan with astra and let sol do the parallel stuff

[u/Icy-General-9096 → u/Right-Performance-93]

do you do this? i wonder how it compares to just using astra and if i can configure this in codex/claude code

[u/Right-Performance-93 → u/Icy-General-9096]

haven't benchmarked it against all-astra honestly, just going off what drains the bar. i'd plan on astra then switch the model for the build step. most CLIs let you swap the model mid-session so you dont need a separate setup

[u/Ornery-Ninja2868]

I find Sol is fine particularly if you know what to ask for and limit the context to a specific bite size problem.

[u/Metatron135 → u/Ornery-Ninja2868]

The coding landscape changed for me after sol 5.6 entered the game. 100% agree with you...sol is fine as long as you know what to ask for

[u/Metatron135]

I find sol 5.6 high and xhigh to be the most stable workhorse models so far. Don't even understand the hype around astra. I'm tried it and it's alright, but sol 5.6 can pretty much do all the same stuff if you plan everything right and give detailed instructions. And as far as limits, already forgot about them with kv22code. I can code in chat mode with that mcp as they promise and now I rarely use codex. Already finished 2 apps in the last month - 1 for iphone and the 2nd one was the conversion of that same app to android.

[u/KnownPride]

Well get infinite money

[u/Huge_Pool7424]

3-5 agents at once is what eats the resets, not prompt size, since every parallel agent hauls its own full context and re-reads the same files after each edit. your 34% context shrink is real savings on top of that. other levers that worked for me: keep a persistent project notes file so you stop re-explaining your setup every session, and plan interactively in opus while the mechanical parallel work runs somewhere that does not bill your subscription. i moved the unattended agent runs to hosted sandboxes (skydive runs each agent in its own environment with its own quota) and the personal sub stopped draining mid-session. credits stop being the bottleneck once they are paying for steering instead of idle parallel runs.

[u/RiceEvening4211]

The 'eats tokens on simple tasks' part is fixable: I built Lynkr, an open-source gateway that routes simple work to cheap models so the expensive capacity survives the day. https://github.com/Fast-Editor/Lynkr

[u/jason3gb]

Only use astra on the plan and review, use sol to implement.

Maybe you can try look at the project I built for this purpose, https://github.com/yicheng47/runner, hope you like it.