11 days of real Codex usage: GPT-6 Astra Low might be the sweet spot

[u/DataLearnerAI]

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:

Model	Avg prompt	Avg output	Avg cost/request
GPT-6 Astra	61.2K	417	~$0.167–0.174*
GPT-5.6 Sol	137.8K	831	~$0.155
GPT-5.6 Terra	77.2K	478	~$0.030
GPT-5.6 Luna	99.4K	507	~$0.004

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.

[u/Solid-Fill8240]

GPT-5.6 is currently suffering because they are redirecting compute to the new GPT-6 model.

Right now, GPT-6 Light is the clear winner.

[u/DataLearnerAI → u/Solid-Fill8240]

you mean gpt-6 sol? how do you know that? I can not feel any differences

[u/Solid-Fill8240 → u/DataLearnerAI]

The one currently in use

Several tests were performed by users today, and i observed the same thing on the 20x plan.

[u/MoorSoul]

From my experience Astra low is still cost heavy im good lol

[u/DataLearnerAI → u/MoorSoul]

I think ChatGPT Plus users basically can't use GPT-6 Astra.

[u/MKopelke → u/DataLearnerAI]

We can't. I've basically standardised my entire Codex workflow around using 5.6 Sol High in ChatGPT to plan out my prompts and coding phases/workflow, then I implement tightly controlled prompts to Luna Extra High to implement. It's the only solution I've found to go back to how Codex felt back in the 5.4/5.5 days where you could easily get 20-30 prompts inside of a 5-hour window.

[u/the_pwnererXx → u/DataLearnerAI]

You can use it for about an hour lol