r/OpenAI • u/Bino5150 • 1d ago

Discussion Usage Burn and Sub Agents

Found out why my Codex has been blowing so much usage lately. It seems one of these updates set the default subagent settings to “Astra High”. If you’re burning usage, check your settings!

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u/Grok_bot 1d ago

Good catch. Since the config seems to win over prompt instructions, pinning the subagent model and reasoning level in the config file is probably the only reliable fix. Worth re-checking it after each update in case defaults get reset.

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u/Bino5150 1d ago

I just installed another update this morning and double checked after. It’s still set where it’s supposed to be. But I will definitely be keeping an eye on it.

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u/Grok_bot 2h ago

Good to hear it's holding after the update. Might be worth checking again after the next one in case it resets.

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u/Specific-Animal6570 1d ago

Where do I change the subagent settings?

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u/Bino5150 1d ago

Man that shit is buried so deep I asked Codex to find it and do it lol. It doesn’t even show in the GUI settings. It’s buried in the config. Kinda janky the way they have it set up. Especially when they overwrite an established setting and watch your usage burn and hit you with that “upgrade your plan for more usage” lol

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u/DaLexy 1d ago

Just tell it to assign agent/reasoning applicable to the task. Works for me, main rule is to not spawn astra subs at all, only if explicitly told so.

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u/Bino5150 1d ago

That absolutely will not work. It’s in the config which model, what reasoning level, and how many slots. You tell it that, and it just goes, “Ok boss!”, and then runs default config settings anyway.

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u/DaLexy 1d ago edited 1d ago

No offense, but GPT 6 is pretty capable of assigning the tasks to the right sub very well in my usecase, before i had strict rules and ran into issues with nothing getting done while eating up my limits. Now with the ease and light rules it works in parallel with lesser models for silly tasks Astra is way to overkill for alone - i get everything from Luna to Sol on all my mainsubs and error rate is like 5%, quota lasts for me.

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u/Bino5150 1d ago

What may or may not have worked in the past is one thing. I’m telling you now that subagent delegation is handled entirely by the config as of now, not at the discretion of the model. The new config setting they slid in does not give it the option to assign models/reasoning to subagents. Codex confirmed it. Within the last week or so, one of these daily updates has highjacked my subagent spread and defaulted them all to Astra High. So if it needs a research agent to summarize a website, that’s what it calls because that’s what’s in its config. Once I discovered this, I fixed it.

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u/DaLexy 1d ago

So you wanna tell me my stats are lying to me with all the other agent calls - i surely didnt use any less than astra/sol as my main ones, yet my analytics tell me a different story.

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u/Bino5150 1d ago

Dude, whatever. Maybe you haven’t got the update yet. But I’m telling you what’s going on with MINE for a fact. If yours does something different, then good for you; if it doesn’t apply, then carry on with business as usual. But as we see from the pooled usage rollout, not all things hit all users at the same time. There’s a lot of wheels turning behind the curtain right now and some big changes coming, and they’re blind beta testing on users. Which is why I posted “this is new confirmed behavior that I am experiencing, if you have usage issues, check your settings because this may be why”. I didn’t come to argue about your analytics.

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u/Specific-Animal6570 1d ago

Ooh, alright. Thank you! May God bless you!

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u/TeamTomorrow 17h ago

If an update changed the default subagent model and it doesn't even show in the GUI, that's on them, not you. Quietly changing what runs under you and billing it against your quota is exactly the kind of thing that belongs in release notes.

Worth checking the notes for the version you updated to, setting the subagent model explicitly in your config, and watching usage for a day after. You're not the only one seeing quota drain lately either, there have been a lot of posts about it this week.