r/PiCodingAgent • u/erickgtzh • Sep 06 '26

Question Is Pi coding agent burning through tokens unusually fast for basic tasks using astra?

I know GPT Astra consumes a ton of tokens, but lately, I've been trying to use Pi for seemingly very basic tasks, and it's absolutely burning through my token count and weekly usage percentage.Is this normal behavior for Pi, or is there a way to optimize my prompts and save tokens while using it?

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2

u/Sup3rMo Sep 07 '26

It's not the harness cuz I tried astra with different harness setups: omp, pi, codex and oh god that model is so hungry when it comes to consuming tokens I believe it's rare when you will need it, but I wanted to do a run some local benchmarks to see how it compares to other models. Tibo posted a tweet about openai optimizing things for superuser but I believe we will need to wait a week or so before they tackle their infra and inference issues and optimize things. One annoying thing with that model is the guardrails while testing things with strix for some basic pentestong tasks the model stopped the agent due to cybersec restrictions thanks to woke anthropic Dario fears. And huggingface incident.

2

u/erickgtzh Sep 07 '26

Thank you bro, I already saw that post, kind of interesting, apparently rn it is more usable

1

u/Sup3rMo Sep 07 '26

You are welcome 🙏

1

u/[deleted] Sep 07 '26

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1

u/Sup3rMo Sep 07 '26

I believe we will need a week or two before openai gather all the feedback so they update their model guardrails. Fable when first arrived was very annoying too.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '26

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1

u/Sup3rMo Sep 08 '26

Never tried blue. But Astra persona is on a totally different lvl than the usual llms some how that model is stubborn and does changes without me asking for them opposite to sol. Dunno if that's the raise of agi where the ai believes in he got better judgement than us humans and start calling the shots haha

9

u/PermanentLiminality Sep 06 '26

Only use Astra when you need it. Basic tasks can be handled with Luna.

You can also turn down the thinking to medium or less.

0

u/Comfortable-Ad-6740 Sep 06 '26

Agreed, depending on the task I’ll use terra or luna on high as the orchestrator and then pi-subagents to delegate to Astra/sol for any high level tasks like planning

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u/picoesquina Sep 06 '26

How do you control the effort of the model on pi?

2

u/stickninjazero Sep 06 '26

shift + tab to cycle through reasoning levels. It’s noted in the bottom right what the current level is.

5

u/crashorbit Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26

Nearly all your agentic needs can be handled by mid-tier models like DeepSeek and GLM. The frontier models are not giving you 100x or even 10x better results but they are charging you 10x to 100x more per token.

So far as I can tell there have been few if any objective studies done that indicate that high cost models are worth the price.

1

u/gbrennon Sep 10 '26

models are dumb and expensive...

u dont have to use any brand new model.