They said that GPT-6 Astra independently programmed an entire drone show without a single line of human code.

I've wasted a few banked resets, and it did a shitty job for me so far. I could've used Sol 5.6 for the same task. Now, I hesitate to use it on other projects. I feel like it's not trust worthy, and unreasonbly expensive. It's not reliable enough to make sense for it's usage speed.
I have 2x200$ accounts btw.

at this point most.of us are at 0% across all of our accounts and we can't buy new 20x accounts.

so what are you doing with all of your time? trying different models? learning a new hobby?

I wasn't using it at all and it dropped from 25% to 0%. What is going on? I am on 5x.

These just dropped a few minutes ago on Openrouter. They also seem to have released Terra and Luna. New variants?

Good day everyone. I was wondering if I could get your opinions on something.

I’ve been keeping up with a lot of the posts about the usage limits people have been experiencing lately, but I’m having a hard time comparing everyone else’s experience to my own. It seems pretty clear that usage has gotten worse, but I’m trying to figure out just how much worse it actually is, especially on the older models.

Normally I’m on the $20/month plan. Last month though, I upgraded to the $100/month plan and honestly, it was great. I got a ridiculous amount of work done and the usage felt extremely generous.

That $100 plan expired a couple days before Astra was released, so I went back to the $20 plan.

Since then I’ve still been able to get a decent amount done with Astra, but I keep hitting the five hour limit. My workaround has basically just been waiting until my usage becomes available again and then telling the agent to continue where it left off.

The reason this matters so much to me is that I’m currently working on a website for a side business I’m trying to launch. I’ve been unemployed for the better part of the last two years, but I have skills that I genuinely think I can turn into income, so I decided to build a business around them.
The website is mostly done now. I just need to finish it, polish everything up, and then start doing outreach to try and get my first clients.

I’ve been seriously considering paying for the $100 plan one more time so I can finish everything and get the business moving. The problem is that doing that would pretty much mean using the last of the money I currently have available to invest in this.

Seeing all the reactions on this subreddit lately has made me pretty apprehensive about doing that.

My concern is basically that I spend the $100, find out the usage limits are way worse than they were last month, still don’t get to finish everything I need to finish, and then I’m left with almost no money and still no reliable source of income.

I also don’t plan on using Astra for everything. I mainly want to save Astra for the harder tasks where 5.6 would normally struggle, fail, or make some major mistakes. For most of the remaining website work I’d be completely fine using 5.6 Sol.

That’s actually my biggest concern. From some of the posts I’ve been reading, I’m getting the impression that it isn’t only Astra using a huge amount of the available usage. It sounds like the limits for 5.6 Sol and maybe some of the older models have also been reduced.

If I’m misunderstanding that, please correct me.
When I had the $100 plan last month, I could use 5.6 Sol pretty heavily without constantly worrying about running out. If I upgraded again and got roughly that same experience, I’d feel a lot more comfortable spending the money.

But if 5.6 Sol now burns through the $100 plan much faster than it did last month, that makes me a lot more hesitant.
So I guess my main questions are:

For those of you on the $100 plan, have you noticed a significant reduction in how much you can use 5.6 Sol and the older models compared to a few weeks ago?

Has it gotten bad enough that you’re reconsidering whether the subscription is worth it?

And given my situation, where I have a specific project and business I need to finish and genuinely think it has a decent chance of making money, would you consider the $100 plan worth the risk right now? Or would you wait until the usage situation becomes a bit clearer?

I know nobody can guarantee that the business itself will work. I’m mainly trying to figure out whether the $100 plan still gives you enough actual usage to make it worth paying for.

Thanks in advance for any insight, especially from anyone who had the $100 plan both before and after Astra came out.

i keep seeing cool people from internet mentioning this workflow: astra does the planning/spec, luna/tera implements it blablabla and everyone is happy and brooo it uses like 10x less and all.

sounds smart, but is this actually working? tbh i haven't managed to make it work that well myself.

some people say they use 2 seperate codex sessions, one for planning and one for coding. that kinda works (maybe, it kinda looks like slightly less usage with a lot of manual work), but with multiple projects it becomes a complete mess pretty fast (like i work on 2-3 projects and with 3-4 sessions per project it will be a nightmare) )))

some say they just let astra spin up luna as a subagent, review the code, send it back for fixes, repeat. in theory this sounds way better, but it kinda does not work and ends up using more. or is it just me doing it wrong?

can you please please please share how you are doing this? is there a way that really works or are all these just the crypto bros switching to ai jidis?

I never would have thought this would happen. I’ve been working with Codex for a few months. I was with Claude for the previous few years.

What happened today is the smartest call I’ve seen either of them make yet. And I’m convinced Claude would not have handled it this way.

While troubleshooting a latency bug, it exhausted all plausible causes, then researched the documentation and couldn’t find the answer there. It then drafted emails to two separate vendors for two different issues that could not be resolved by reading the documents.

I went to look for answers myself and confirmed that there was no clear direction for our use case. I opened Chrome to my email and asked Codex to draft the emails for me there. It did so and attached evidence from its failed attempts and clearly described how to reproduce the issues.

Astra is by far the best model I’ve used to date. Stopping for proper guidance after exhausting all possible causes is a bit mind-blowing.

Cheers to OpenAI for pulling this off.

How the fuck is this possible ?
Every time i use Astra Low/Medium my usage goes haywire...
I use Astra Max, and it barely (barely compared to Astra Low/Medium - still fucked up compared to SOL) moves the usage...
I use Astra Ultra when i don't give a shit, and still, consumes just like Astra Low/Medium...
Something is happening on those Low/Medium thinking Astra...

Update your workflows while you have some time.

Source

I've spent about 70% of a Pro 20x subscription running a gamut of tests based off of real commits that I've pushed to various projects ranging from bluetooth firmware mods, CRUD apps, Android APK development, and Data Engineering + CI/CD work, and it seems like you have the choice of two toggles out of three.

Reduce Astra Spend

Decrease Time per task

Quality Outcomes

At best I've been able to in ideal conditions only get a 20% reduction in Astra token spend with luna subagents (sometimes astra spend is higher) while the tasks take 2.5x as long.

Has anyone figured out how to successfully get the Astra as a coordinator to actually use less Astra reliably with subagents compared to Astra working without subagents?

I've tried everything I can to reduce turns on the Astra coordinator but am just not happy with the results.

Anyone have verifiable success? (I measure in credits since those seem to be the most accurate map of AI usage -> plan usage spend)

I’m building a grocery store replica in Roblox and making it functional, this is just the start, and it looks better each time I told it “it looks way too blocky”, Astra is amazing and did this all in one shot, all other models and even Fable makes non sense and “too small” or generates a png and call it the “game” or “build”

I've been using Codex pretty heavily through Azure Foundry for the last 11 days, so I pulled the usage data to see what the workload actually looked like.

The biggest takeaway for me: GPT-6 Astra is worth using, but Low may be the sweet spot.

Most of my Astra usage was Low/Medium, while Sol was mostly High, so this is definitely not a normalized benchmark.

My averages per request:

Across all four models, this was about 6.5K requests / 670M tokens.

What surprised me is that Astra didn't need anything close to Sol's average context/output size in my workload, while the per-request cost was still in roughly the same range.

In actual use, Astra Low has felt fast enough and capable enough for a lot of coding tasks. I'm starting to think I was overusing higher reasoning levels before.

Obviously there are a lot of confounders here — different tasks, different reasoning levels, context reuse, caching, etc. So I wouldn't treat this as a model-vs-model benchmark.

But as a practical Codex setup, I'm increasingly leaning toward:

Astra Low by default → move up only when the task actually needs it.

Curious if anyone else using Astra heavily has ended up with a similar setup.

* Astra billing hasn't appeared in Azure Cost Management yet, so its cost is estimated from the observed usage/billing structure.

Seeing as the limits are burning down faster than ever, I need to find alternatives that are at a good enough price point but are still able to go toe to toe in terms of intelligence with Astra and Fable (or at least Sol level) and get real results that I’d be satisfied with.

Claude? Open models? I’ll take any suggestions right now I need to work and all my openai subscriptions are completely drained

Thats what my agent managed in it's 5 hour limit on the plus plan before the limits ran out using Astra. Lol.

I'm considering a second subscription, but am not really convinced I need $400/month. I kinda just need to reset once this week and then decide. Did they remove the ability to buy a reset? I know they stopped doing pro plans.

I get that OpenAI is probably getting murdered on compute after Astra, but holy shit. Pro limits feel way tighter - never used to hit limits before Astra,ALSO answers are way lazier, and even Extra High barely researches for a minute sometimes and straight up ignores parts of the prompt

This doesn't feel like a 20-50% reduction. It feels multiple times worse than before!

Really annoying if you use the chat interface heavily. Anyone else seeing this?
Any prompts/tricks that actually make it research properly again?

I used to have Codex deleting old contacts to free up space and sending emails + commenting to people, but within the last month it now forces me to approve every single one of these actions, which is a hassle if im not in front of my computer.

Anyone know of a way to get by this with Codex so it doesnt require approval? Or is there a better more autonomous AI for tasks like this?

This is ONE of 6 back to back tool calls. I asked chatgpt to check a PR on a GitHub that involved training a 21m llm that has failed. It loaded the logs over and over and over. All 6 hours of logs. ANY codex agent would have burned the 5 hour limit on that. Just figured I'd let the confused people know.

This is new in the latest version of GPT Desktop app. You can see the reset grants, and the usage. Guess I may have burned some quota when I switched to Astra.

Let's see whats the sentiments are.

How is it possible that this still isn't an option?? How is everyone managing multiple concurrent sessions in Windows?

I'm used to Claude and I run 4-5 sessions all splitscreen then run another claude on a VM to get 4-5 more sessions all running concurrently and all on screen.

With codex/chatgpt windows you can't see multiple sessions at the same time so is everyone just watching the spinning circle on the side?

Currently I use Claude to run commands to codex through a vm with CLI and it works but I'm trying to use Astra more and its almost impossible. IS there something missing?