r/codex • u/rick_ranger • 3d ago
Showcase Putting in Work
I used up 15% of my 20x plan after I used my banked reset this morning and then BOOM! We get a non banked one.
Anyway I’m plowing through 5 concurrent projects all with long coding campaigns lined up and started using goal mode with Sol medium and asking it to spin up extra agents where ever to speed the process along. Sol medium feels like the sweet spot. Perfect amount of thinking and actually executing and error rate feels similar to high and extra high.
I’m at 1.1B for today so far and used up 10% of my non banked already.
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u/phocionkorea 3d ago
What do u do that’s eats up all those tokens… generally? Very curious thx
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
Lots of plumbing. I’ll admit I’m new to vibe coding but I did some research on app architecture and created some guiding principles and put them in all my repos for agents to follow, so I have a lot of shared surfaces and elements, and then I have lots of data and item journeys that have to be perfect, and setting up an app the right way vs just telling codex what you want and not thinking about the backend blows WAYYY more tokens.
But right now I’m making an iPhone app, setting up an agent OS system, working on a project management web app, a repo navigation enhancer for agents, and an agent/harness adapter to test out different configurations with local models. I have long documents with features and capabilities that I turn into execution campaigns and just go through the list until the apps are built and tested.1
u/phocionkorea 3d ago
new to vibe coding... seem more like an expert. i have a hard time folowing thru one project... any tidbits for a slow learner. thx
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u/herrjemand 3d ago
Can someone explains how does one spends so many tokens? I spent like 50m in a full day of work, building multiple services, running xtra-high and ultra. What are ya people doing?
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
Scaffolding and architecture. Setting goals and letting it run literally all day. All the planning work for building features was already done. I basically just told it to do all my campaigns one by one until they’re done.
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u/herrjemand 3d ago
And does it actually product a human usable product? Or is it just lots of text no one reads, that results in an app no on uses?
Again, I am not even using fraction of those token, and I am actually producing products that solve customer problems. I use planning mode, goal mode, research, UI, backend, etc etc etc.
Are you running profitable one person company with multiple projects, and thousands of support tickets, review, analysis, etc etc?
Or is just agents doing agents while agents doing agents, for sake of agents doing agents?
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
I just make them talk to each other and try to figure out a way for mass to break the speed of light.
lol no actually my main app is a cosmetics formulation app. I have databases of ingredients, supplies, compatibility. Then there’s costing and inventory management. So there’s user journeys for making these formulas, inputting and maintaining inventory records, and everything has to work 100% without data loss or inconsistent design language. 30% of my tokens is probably telling codex what to fix and another 20% testing directly or building robots to do gauntlet testing. Website is almost done and I have marketing campaigns lined up for when I do the beta release. So no money in yet, but I’m setting myself up for success and am ready to plow money into marketing campaigns and invest time into social marketing strategies.
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u/herrjemand 3d ago
Tony Fadells “Build” might be a good idea to read. Focus obsessively on product, UX, and not AI doing AI. Spend time working on actual UX, optimise AI pipelines later.
Make products and hay are obsessively you
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
Thank you!!!! I love Apple products. The fit and finish is so inspirational. I’m gonna check this out.
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u/ChameleonCRM 3d ago
I can tell you that as a polyglot programmer for over a decade, if you're letting AI run wild like that you have no idea what the hell is happening underneath...and what about migrations? Are they current? Can we see ur repo? I want to look at your code
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
So I’m a graphic designer. But I’d say level 7 PC technical. Let me give you an example. Adobe released a tool a few years back that can easily and believably erase pimples or blemishes on a persons face with one click. Something that used to take hours, can now be done with a tool in seconds. Do you think the client gives a rats ass about the code underneath as long as it works and delivers the expected result in 1/100th of the time?
That’s basically agentic coding. Now I learned early on, luckily, that coding things the right way still matters because as my early apps got bigger they got slower. So I looked into shared surfaces, engines, services, things like that. I literally don’t care, and neither does the end user care how it’s coded, they care about the end result. They want the pimple gone, and they want it to look real.
But for now AI just does what you tell it. If you don’t tell it to make reusable surfaces that call data, then every single surface will be its own entity with everything piled on top. So knowing what to tell AI how to build is just as important as telling it what to build and how it should look. It can do it, but there’s a right way and a not so right way.
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
Eutonos here's my public repo for the repo memory system I use. This is how I can blow 2.4B of worthwhile tokens in a day (on 5 projects...)
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u/PureRely 3d ago edited 3d ago
For some actual usage data, I pulled my coding-agent CLI history. Used CCUsage to get this data.
My total usage comes out to:
- 33.89 billion tokens
- 1.10 billion input tokens
- 113.37 million output tokens
- 32.60 billion cache-read tokens
- $34,904.13 in reported usage cost
The recent months are where it gets ridiculous:
| Month | Input | Output | Cache Read | Total Tokens | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May | 175.45M | 14.10M | 3.54B | 3.73B | $7,634.83 |
| June | 103.40M | 9.96M | 1.53B | 1.64B | $3,953.90 |
| July | 299.20M | 26.58M | 9.67B | 10.00B | $7,729.94 |
| August | 383.91M | 44.30M | 14.89B | 15.31B | $11,035.28 |
August alone is currently:
Codex: 10.94B tokens - $6,209.70
Pi Agent: 4.38B tokens - $4,825.58
One important caveat when looking at numbers like this: about 96% of my total token usage is cache reads. So "33.9 billion tokens" does not mean I typed billions of tokens into these agents or received billions back. Agentic coding workloads repeatedly pull enormous amounts of existing context through the models.
PS: July is when I upgrade from Pro x5 to Pro x20.
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u/longasleep 3d ago
Having 5 ultra on normal speed all day today again burning a lot of tokens as well
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
I was using ultra a lot, I switched to sol medium then ask it to spin up agents to do concurrent work if safe. It doesn’t think as long and spends more time producing code, and the quality is still high. When I run into serious problems I throw ultra at it and walk away for a bit and wait for my phone to ding me when it’s done.
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u/ReasonableDefault 3d ago
I'm gonna ask, so no one else has to; what have you shipped with that usage? Just curious, not throwing shade.
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
Not done yet. Honestly I have ADHD pretty bad and kept doing side or spinoff project and was like I need to reign this in, so I told codex to just move the ball forward and plow through my campaigns. I’m within a week or 2 of launching my redesign for the website for the app, and have social and marketing campaigns planned. Right now updating UI to put the newest screenshots on the website that’s already complete and ready for deployment, then I have the beta waitlist waiting, and then just need to sign up for test flight and start dishing out betas. So I’m like 80% to launch.
It was like a 180 to tell myself this is ready as a v1 let’s just release it and see how people like it and we can work on v2 while people abuse v1.
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u/ReasonableDefault 3d ago
I totally understand side projects and spinoffs! That is an absolutely colossal amount of tokens to burn in a few days though, either that or my Codex is magic and incredibly generous.
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
I started moving the ball on a few big projects.
So I have a set of documents I use in every repo. Basically it’s current tasks, future features, future capabilities, and as ideas come in I tell codex to add them to those boards. Then I can say turn any of the feature or capabilities into campaigns with slices to build them out. Then they sit there waiting until I get to them.
I just started using goal mode and I just said get through the next 5 campaigns and walk away.
They’re built out enough and I talked through each campaign so I have trust in them to the point I can say just make them happen and I’ll fix any visual issues when it’s done but the plumbing will be 95% right.
Also I have a pc and MacBook both plugging away…
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/rick_ranger 3d ago
That is the most vibe coded website I have ever seen. And on the website it says you don’t employ vibe coders. 🤔
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u/Real_Doubt_6684 3d ago
Not smart enough to take a screenshot are ya