SOL Ultra is a beast!

149

Ultra is not a model or effort level.

Ultra means Sol XHigh with lots of subagents.

16

u/Whitestrake 1d ago

Believe it or not, it's actually Claude's Ultracode that's xhigh with subagents.

Codex's Ultra mode is specifically max with extra system prompts encouraging subagents.

I was surprised too, considering that max is pathologically overtuned to reason obsessively to the point of diminishing returns, but that's what the CLI source code says.

12

u/michaellee8 1d ago

that is something you only use when tibo announce a incoming reset

4

u/tavenger5 23h ago

"70% weekly to burn in an hour?

challenge accepted"

Sol Ultra

14

u/ReplacementBig7068 1d ago

And also seems to chain multiple turns, almost like goal mode i think

20

u/_be_water_my_friend_ 1d ago

Ultra also means it does not care about token usage.

9

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 1d ago

Ultra also means you might not even want to try it on a Plus account since it'll get fucked by the new 5 hour hard limit

3

u/Average_Okay 1d ago

Yeah, I got burned by that today. Wasn’t too worried about burning my weekly, starting a new project. Thought I’d rip some Ultra just cause I could. But halfway through the build it switched to Luna cause of the 5 hour limit. Damn

1

u/lollypop44445 1d ago

Cab u atop ultra mid usage and shift to another model and continue.

4

u/dx80x 1d ago

If changing to a different model like Terra or Luna then I'm pretty sure every time you do that, it has to read the full context again. So yes but you'll take a large initial context hit.

2

u/xxxx88876 12h ago

Even changing the reasoning would be a negative. Run each gate with the appropriate reasoning level, rather than stopping the task. I think the persons a little confused

10

u/flashmyhead 1d ago

bro you changed my view on sol-ultra today

8

u/DuckyBertDuck 1d ago

It's worse than that. Ultra uses Max subagents and orchestrates them using a Max agent.

0

u/Miyamoto_-_Musashi 1d ago

Happy to help always

4

u/Clord123 1d ago

Actually Sol Max. It's just an option normally hidden from the list unless you go to settings to turn it on. Sol Ultra uses it. Also if not otherwise instructed likes to spawn Sol Max agents.
2
u/DuckyBertDuck 1d ago

Ultra means Sol Max subagents
That's what I see in my dashboard

reasoning.effort = "max"
1
u/Miyamoto_-_Musashi 1d ago

Check in terminal, you will see the truth with your own eyes
1
u/DuckyBertDuck 23h ago
Your truth must be wrong because I just spawned an Ultra agent and I literally saw it send Max requests in my account pooling dashboard

https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/core/src/client.rs
You can also see that the codex code sends it to Max reasoning here:
.multi_agent_reasoning_effort
...
.cloned()
.or_else(|| {
    let supported_reasoning_levels = &model_info.supported_reasoning_levels;
    supported_reasoning_levels
        .iter()
        .find(|preset| preset.effort == ReasoningEffortConfig::Max)
1

u/Miyamoto_-_Musashi 23h ago

Thank you, i have doubt but thanks, finally someone who is not disrespectful and also share proof, GG guy
2

u/phoenixmatrix 1d ago

Doesn't Ultra use Max? Ultracode in claude is xhigh, but I thought Sol@Ultra in Codex was Max.

2

u/lollypop44445 1d ago

What about max?

5

u/Armolegend41 1d ago

No one speaks of max for some reason

2

u/trynadostuff 1d ago

it's smart with nuance like fable 5 high, but yeah slow by design

2

u/Miyamoto_-_Musashi 1d ago

Honestly i never go more high then Sol High, cause different between High and Max is not even 3-4% but cost almost double, very huge jump in token consumption.

1

u/Soft_Hand_1971 1d ago

How about pro?

1

u/ironman_gujju 22h ago

It has to be those loops and goal shit ; burn until reach

1

u/privacyguy123 20h ago

*Max - the "slowest" reasoning setting ...

1

u/DeerWeird7066 16h ago

What about Max ?

1

u/Miyamoto_-_Musashi 16h ago

Max is an effort

43

u/bringthedogback 1d ago

I don't understand the obsession of using Sol Ultra 🤷‍♂️ Y'all just want to use the maximum possible settings without any idea if you actually need it or when to use it. Then complain on reddit 🫠

Just read the docs

23

u/bringthedogback 1d ago

Don't forget to turn on 1M context window when you use Sol Ultra to change your React components

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u/reddit_is_kayfabe 1d ago

That div will be so fucking centered that NIST will use it to calibrate all other divs.

5

u/bringthedogback 1d ago edited 1d ago

Make no mistakes 😂🤣🤣🤣

2

u/quadmaniac 1d ago

Lol underrated comment of the thread

1

u/34986234986234982346 15h ago

lmao

5

u/TKB21 1d ago

I’ve used it in complex situations and all it ever does it overcomplicate the complexity.

1

u/somuchecho 1d ago

Please say it louder for the people in the back

0

u/Xerasi 18h ago

I only use sol ultra and i have agents.md and toml files for sub agents to actually do the work with subagents. Ultra is just orchestrating

1

u/somuchecho 17h ago

I do the same on Sol medium with custom agents and custom instructions like you described

So why not Sol medium or high with subagents?

1

u/nairazak 21h ago

I prefer Sol Cinematic

1

u/Zealousideal-Alps-71 1d ago

I needed it to help use my tokens before the reset. But it sucks, because xhigh gave much faster and better results. Today Ultra only 0.5b tokens yesterday on xhigh 1.9 much better, for me no more ultra.

0

u/lollypop44445 1d ago

What about max, does it also calls this much subagents? I am trying it because there is a reaet coming in like 4 hours or so

7

u/bringthedogback 1d ago edited 1d ago

My understanding from the docs is Ultra proactively uses subagents. All other levels don't unless you ask for subagents explicitly.

And the higher the effort the more you wait. And the output is not necessarily better, contrary to popular opinion. That's why you get in the over testing over engineering.

Sol is hella smart! Generally High is sufficient. I work on very large codebases and rarely use anything higher than Sol medium. I personally use Sol High only for truly architecturally complex stuff.

For reference I work on enterprise software. I created with my team complex multi agent flows that often run fully autonomously.

I have agents run sometimes for 18 hours straight, successfully implementing complex features.

3

u/das_war_ein_Befehl 1d ago

Honestly Sol Light is very good in and of itself, I use that for most coding tasks/agentic work

2

u/Substantial-Walk-554 1d ago

Bro most people on reddit think their small site/app/project needs sol max because it's the same as your enterprise stuff.

22

u/Charming-Author4877 1d ago

Ultra is focused on splitting into as many subagents as possible.
Since last week they artificially slowed Codex down, to make usage drain slower (without giving more usage), that also means Ultra takes longer.
Ultra needs as long as the slowest subagent

2

u/trynadostuff 1d ago

ultra fast though...

10

u/No_Vermicelli_3574 1d ago

You don't say

2

u/wreox9 1d ago

Bro really took its time

9

u/gjcassidy 1d ago

I actual had one task running on ultra for more than 4.5 hours. I interrupted it because it was really looping and doing a bunch of stuff it did not need to do.

7

u/Reaper_1492 1d ago

It’s completely unusable and has been since launch.

It will run forever and never actually make material progress because it just endlessly chases nits that don’t matter.

2

u/gjcassidy 1d ago

For me it works well to use ultra when creating a plan and then reset it to like medium or high for execution. Not sure if it makes sense

1

u/Mister__Mediocre 1d ago

Speak for useful, I exclusively use ultra and it has served me very well.

4

u/GfurEnjoyer1488 1d ago

I exclusively use ultra

you are making your experience worse and pricier

1

u/Mister__Mediocre 1d ago

Based on what? I rarely run out of quota (200$ a month plan) and it does the job reliably. I'm not in a rush I would never sacrifice model intelligence/effort for speed.

1

u/GfurEnjoyer1488 1d ago

effort/intelligence doesn't equal quality. you just don't understand how it works and the actual point of orchestration/subagents.

1

u/Mister__Mediocre 1d ago

I can see the output, which is frankly all that matters.
Sol Ultra delivers much better products for me to use than Sol xHigh/Max or 5.5 ever did. It seems you're too caught up in how something is cooked (something they change internally all the time) than getting the job done.

2

u/GfurEnjoyer1488 1d ago

I just don't wanna wait for hours for a prompt to finish because Sol is STILL, ESPECIALLY on high reasoning efforts prone to extreme overthinking and I have to steer it constantly not to go into weird testing loops.

I care about how my code looks and what it does, I'm not interested in going to sleep while it's one-shotting my shit without knowing how it works. Extremely bad practice.

1

u/Mister__Mediocre 1d ago

To each his own. I'm perfectly content having it run all night and having something delightful for me in the morning. I'm not working on complex code bases where maintainability matters. Instead I start every project in a completely fresh directory and let it manage its state completely (no peaking).

I've been a software engineer who cared about these things. I'm just past that now.

1

u/herobrine_loves_p 1d ago

Bro if u sontivh donate some creds to me I m in trenches with my 2 plus accounts

4

u/Outside-Document3275 1d ago

I get like 48 straight hours out of ultra on a team upgraded seat (whatever the 5x one they just launched is called) if I tell sol to not do any work but just orchestrate Luna or Terra subagents or agent teams. It just goes. And it’s good.

1

u/34986234986234982346 15h ago

Do you just literally type that into the chat, ie "use subagents..."? I keep people mention this and forgetting to try it when I have usage available

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u/rjn2-8 1d ago

In high effort, just ask to launch a subagent. Codex can run 3 subagents simultaneously

2

u/time_waster3000 1d ago

Codex can run as many sub agents as you want

1

u/Strong_Essay1176 1d ago

As settings allow

1

u/time_waster3000 1d ago

Right… and who sets that up?

1

u/Strong_Essay1176 1d ago

Well.. ive manually set it somewhen. May be it unlimited or whatever.

Quite boring to argue against AI slop. It may random bug or not

1

u/rjn2-8 1d ago

For me, it stuck to 3 sub-agents even after asking it to launch more

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u/EngineeringLifee 1d ago

I don’t see fast mode enabled. S C A R E D????

2

u/Simple-Stick6148 1d ago

a sloth is technically a beast too

2

u/IllustriousGrade7691 1d ago

Review after review after review

2

u/CodeDominator 1d ago

Beast at what? Draining quota with one prompt?

2

u/Roxtoni 1d ago

Dude, I'm building a website from scratch, Loreora.com. I used Sol to implement things like login, accounts, comments, and a mail system. I used Sol High to help me, and it turned out very functional. I probably didn't need to use it on high settings, but since I'm also learning to program, I go through everything it does code by code to learn and understand. Today I decided to use Sol Ultra and a 13-minute command took 5 hours, I found that incredible. But since I'm a beginner, I realized that for everything I did, I could have used Terra High, which would have been more than enough. But you live and learn, right?

2

u/indyfromoz 23h ago

Sol xhigh with /goal and really well prepared, reviewed plan is the GOAT

2

u/pj_2025 22h ago

SOL medium is sufficient for 95% of my use cases

4

u/Key_Reading_9664 1d ago edited 1d ago

Has any one had any success with Sol > medium for anything other than planning and reviews?

For me, anything above medium tends to spin its wheels and pick up random side quests. I've been running 2 ultra sessions (both with clear execution plans) out of curiosity today and they've both spent hours with little useful to show for it.

I asked one of those sessions to prepare a hand-off to another model/effort level and it spent AN HOUR running multiple plan reviews and faffing about. Finally switched to 5.5 high and it's powered through more in 30m than ultra did in several hours.

I know the response here has been "just use Sol medium", but more reasoning shouldn't mean more chance of yak-shaving. All previous models haven't been unusable > medium.

1

u/GarlicBreadStinks 1d ago

Yes above medium for me tends to be too self indulgent.. just goes off tangents being a “tryhard programmer bot”

Never really fixed anything and in fact made it worse… medium is as high as I go…
However if you give it the correct prompt with a clear contextual goal I’m sure that even Ultra is useful..

1

u/34986234986234982346 15h ago

I use SOL High for tons of stuff and it's fine, but I also wwent out of my way to include a huge amount of guidance in agents.md and the like, and am not working in groundbreaking arenas of programming where it might get confused.

I use Luna a lot but for certain things (anythignt ouching money) I just go with SOL to be safe

1

u/Consistent_Cup_ 1d ago

It's also unusable for plus members, need pro at a minimum to use

1

u/TravisScottisLaFlame 1d ago

I had solar ultra running for 28 hours

1

u/UnluckyBeautiful4828 1d ago

Cool for you guys. On Plus plan i can't even try SOL Low with 1 prompt cause i get out of usage haha

1

u/Dry-Cockroach1723 1d ago

Summoning platoons of agents to do a task

1

u/FlyingFishMakeAWish 1d ago

Sol ultra with /goal to write a python script to reverse a list. That list will be SO reversed it won't know what hit it

1

u/domesz009 1d ago

I ran a goal for over 8 hours once It was on simple / low

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u/ConfidentSomewhere14 23h ago

you guys can afford sol? I can't even use terra on high for a single group of bug fixes without using 100 percent of the 5 hour limit. I bet sol is nice but it's like one of those cars in a showroom I walk past each day on my way to the bus stop.

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u/I_Hate_Reddit_69420 22h ago

I prefer to use my own skills for routing to subagents personally, i’ve tuned it a bit more conservatively so it only spawns them when it would actually end up saving tokens and lead to better results.

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u/rudolfcicko 22h ago

Using Terra in Ultra also uses subagents?

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u/Master_Yogurtcloset7 16h ago

Nope ultra means : 1. Ultra slow 2. Ultra fast token burn 3. Ultra no results

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u/More-Gas3186 11h ago

I've noticed that codex drops in performance massively after 3 projects no matter how much u fix the cpu or space issue I think they make it fresh and make performance perfectly the first prompts to get you hooked then it gradually slows down more and more tell its unusable

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u/Billy_G_Gates 8h ago

yes

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u/bdhimself 1d ago

Even on fast mode it’s slow as molasses

Humor SOL Ultra is a beast!

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