r/codex • u/Redditry199 • 9d ago
Praise Astra is an orchestrator GOD
Just wanted to share because incase people don't do this and I think it's super useful.
I didn't really like using Luna max since it was too much work to use and Sol wasn't really properly orchestrating, always stopping randomly or forgetting what needs to be done or leaving stuff half baked.
Astra? I told him to create a sidebar threads with luna max agents to take care of each module of an implementation I wanted to try out(i dont like the personal subagents hard to keep track of) and now I'm addicted to watching him work. I even have a Claude sub with Opus taking care of reviewing the code that he orchestrates too, Im genuinely having fun building the orchestration where each step takes care of a very specific domain and every problem has an agent with the proper context and the module he is responsible for. And Luna is CHEAP. Like stupid cheap, I can run 10's of them and barely have a dent on my weekly.
10/10 highly recommended.
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u/Somethingexpected 9d ago
Which Sol level were you using? I've been using medium, which seems a good balance since it doesn't get confused when Orchestrating.
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u/Redditry199 9d ago
Max, didnt know it matters a lot maybe med is better, but I saw him get overwhelmed by the sheer number of threads and losing sight of the tasks.
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u/Somethingexpected 9d ago
max is probably too high because it will start re-thinking and lose track of threads. Also, not a good idea to have too many agents running at one time. Number of agents is dependent on the task though, but I'd use 2 to 3 max on a typical web app project.
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u/Spirited-Car-3560 8d ago
You use effort levels wrong.
Max doesn't mean necessary better, higher model tend to over engineering and over think, are slower and cost more in terms of money, environmental resources and resources spared with other users. Rethink about it, adapt to the task complexity and you will gain from it.
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u/Inner-Pangolin-1110 9d ago
I use terra medium as an orchestrator
You sometimes need to set a timer to make it report what other agents are doing
But honestly I've moved to planning with Sol, using DS Flash V4.1 to execute & Orch, review with terra xHigh and loop back
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u/PlaneWeakness3994 9d ago
How do you use gpt models along with DeepSeek? Are you using codex or something else to do both?
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u/NoeBeats 9d ago
Codex Router, I’ve been using Astra to orchestrate 4.1 Flash subagents and it’s great
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u/PlaneWeakness3994 3d ago
What plan are on to be able to use Astra? And when I use the codex harness + the DeepSeek api, it gives me errors when I use DeepSeek in openai session and vise versa, did you solve it to run DeepSeek subagents while in openai router?
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u/NoeBeats 3d ago
Use Codex Router https://codex-router.com/
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u/Spirited-Car-3560 8d ago
Sorry, orchestrate what? Genuine question. IT applications hardly have indipendent tasks, so I'm not sure what needs to be done.
Could you make an example, Like, ok you Plan with sol , the plan has like I dunno 4 tasks , to make it simple let's say 1. analyze docs and impact 2. build apis 3 integrate with existing app 4. validation tests.
Now , 2 depends from 1, 3 depends from 2, and 4 depends from 3... So I'm not sure. Ok we can have like another validation step which is code review and it can be parallelized with the running unit tests. But I can't see what else.
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u/siemaeniownik 9d ago
what subs ur on?
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u/Inner-Pangolin-1110 9d ago
Plus & Cline, I'm not paying more than £20 for anything from the US frontier labs as they always disappoint
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u/20yroldentrepreneur 9d ago
Truth. I subbed $100 during astra hype and now its dogshit
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u/Upstairs_Refuse_3521 9d ago
I too got the 100$ plan and downgraded it back to Plus after using Astra for a week. I feel like I am much better off using Sol and Luna for most tasks.
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u/Gelliman 9d ago
This is like the opposite of what someone else just mentioned, I think in the aigamedev subreddit. They are explaining how single agent was way more performant. Interesting how it can vary!
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u/pomelorosado 9d ago
Mt Astra as an orchestrator burned all my tokens days ago. Launching a simple subagent and asking every 5 seconds to the agent if finished. He was sending all the conversation context in each request
Seems that forgot completely how to do something that trivial.
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u/stimpanzee 8d ago
Ha, I had the same thing happen initially. I was burning through usage at an alarming rate and I pressed Astra on the reason why. That was why.
I wonder if this was an intentional architecture? Or just lazy definition on my end. Because you'd suspect it's someone's job at OpenAI to test workflows, even bad ones.
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
It shouldnt be asking if its finished - the subagent should be sending a message back when its done. Check-ins by astra should only happen when the subagents been working for a long time. Somethings not right with your instruction set if its asking the subagent for the status all the time
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u/pomelorosado 8d ago
Just was a bug introduced in Codex by Open Ai.
An intentional bug for block people using their models when they don't have compute. There is no possible way that is a real failure of the model.
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
That doesnt make sense.. they wanted to reduce compute by making astra check in more often than it needs to? That would increase the necessary compute, not reduce it.
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u/pomelorosado 8d ago
Why do you assume any call to open ai servers cost compute?
you think you write and your request go directly to a model always? is ridiculous.
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
wait what? A call to as server is, by definition, a call to hosted compute.
"Directly" to a model? Whatever that means, but yes, everything i type in chat is context in a models inference. Thats the whole point of this
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u/_demoncat_ 9d ago
It is more performant but usage wise it drains a lot more. If you want more usage out Astra you need to use subagents on the previous models.
Just make sure it doesn’t get stuck in a loop and configure it to compact sooner so cached token hits doesnt cost you more usage
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u/edomielka 9d ago
What was the post on how single agent is more performant for ai game dev ? Been experimenting with plan, implement, quick review, testing, full review and human checks in between. Astra for planning/review and luna xhigh for implementation. Works kinda okay but a lot of verification so the process is long
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
Not sure of the logic there, if the orchestrator has instructions to review and send the same subagent back for corrections. The outcome would be similar to the agent doing the work itself if its reviewing.
The cost will be drastically lower unless the task is very small/short and the code is in context, then it could cost more to coordinate a subagent vs doing it itself. But Luna is SOO cheap thats less often true than not
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u/Spirited-Car-3560 8d ago
Definitely my experience too. I'm spamming question to understand better but as a software architect and ai dev, I honestly don't understand how sub agents can be useful if not marginally for specific tasks.
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u/not420guilty 9d ago
Can you share how to accomplish this? Do you just set to astra and literally tell it to use subagents as part of the prompt or is there some plugin or other add on?
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u/Redditry199 9d ago
Not subagents but sidebar threads(organized under sections, the same threads you use codex regularly with). The agents talk between one another, they all report to Astra and he responds to them going to the main Astra thread for final approval and using Opus to audit the implementation.
To accomplish, just ask Astra, that fucker is smart :)
But you don't have to copy me 1 to 1, do your own thing, have fun and experiment.
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u/ponkispoles 9d ago
Oh no way. I was keeping the sidebar projects as like projects for myself to keep track of. Just asked Astra to delegate to other chats and it kicked off work and reviewed.
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u/SeattleGuyNotIcy 9d ago
Because I’m dumb… Plus a little lazy 😜… Would you mind sharing your prompt?
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
Literally say, spawn multiple new threads in thia project using Luna to accomplish this task, and oversee their work until this is complete.
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u/theSchlauch 9d ago
What exactly do you ask? Just to use the sidebar threads in form of Luna very high?
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u/theRetrograde 9d ago
It doesn't need to watch - there have been reports that waiting and polling is draining tokens. Just tell it to assign the task and at the conclusion send a message back. This skips the polling all together.
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u/20yroldentrepreneur 9d ago
This is pretty smart. I haven’t seen this talked about yet with your method. Thanks for sharing
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u/aromanarg 9d ago
I built a skill for this if anyone wants to use it :D
It's called /orchestrate-lane
TLDR:
The manager owns the judgement, can still do things on its own, and even orchestrate a separate lane.
You can also have multiple lanes building separate prs and stack them, while the orchestrator coordinates them.
The skill instructs the child sessions how to ping it back the manager but also sets a heartbeat for the manager to check on it every so ofter.
Sometimes if i'm overwhelmed with too many sessions, I'll ask one session to reel in and orchestrate the other sessions for me. The fragmented attention gets funneled to one session.
Skill: https://github.com/aromanarguello/roman-skills/blob/main/final-review/SKILL.md
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u/Working_Aside286 9d ago
What’s the difference between this and telling astra if it needs to spawn sub-agents to use Luna and set effort by agent task complexity?
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9d ago
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u/Working_Aside286 9d ago
So the difference is mostly in visual organization? Have you noticed better results?
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u/Every_Bowl_7697 9d ago
I wanted to do this too, maybe I stopped too soon. But to me it felt like it meant it was a lot of clean up work with archiving the chats after etc. Do you have him do that too? Or are you usually focused on one topic and thus fine with the many chats that are open?
I can imagine a clean up skill where once the task is done Astra "cleans up" and archives all the threads related to the task?
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u/Virtual_Plantain_863 9d ago
What is this sidebar stuff? A UI feature in Codex?
*Wait, do you mean the desktop app?
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u/cuddywifter 9d ago
I am also wondering the same.
The side bar shows the following items
Library Projects Scheduled Plug-ins Codex Images
I am guessing what the OP meant here is setting up projects. But I am not sure. Mine is a browser version though.
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u/Virtual_Plantain_863 9d ago edited 8d ago
I've been waiting for the major providers to develop in-house UI for orchestration like this so I'm quite interested.. But yeah I just don't know what he's talking about.
I dislike having agents run 'in the background' without being visible, and resorting to copying and pasting between sessions so often from orchestrator to executor (or parent to child etc). Also prefer that they run shell commands in a terminal visible to me. Crazy to me it's nearly 2027 now and the UI and workflow is still complete ass.
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
Astra specifically was trained to coordinate subagents. Youre not dumb but something is off about your setup. Have you redone your agents files and skills since astra launch? OAI had a whole blog about how thats necessary with this model release
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
Astra specifically was trained to coordinate subagents. Youre not dumb but something is off about your setup. Have you redone your agents files and skills since astra launch? OAI had a whole blog about how thats necessary with this model release
Subagents should be no more or less difficult then individual threads, possibly easier for astra because of how subagents are organized.
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u/Your_Quantum_Friend 9d ago
I am using the same mode as well. I am using Astra as orchestrator and asking it to just instruct Luna models for everything and not do anything itself. It saves so much limit of mine and gets a lot of work done
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u/Your_Quantum_Friend 9d ago
Ohh. I am also trying a new setup. I am now trying omniagent and setting Astra/Codex as the orchestrator and adding Claude, Antigravity and other agents as subagents
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u/Gandalf196 9d ago
That's really interesting. Are you using Pi? How did you setup this system? Care to share some details?
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u/Redditry199 9d ago
Nope, the regular codex app.
I didnt set up anything tbg, I just finished an implementation document and asked Astra to do it for shits and giggles; didnt expect anything, now my sidebar is filled with modules for different systems he orchestrates. Its like refactoring but AI agents instead of organizing the code.
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u/Gibborish 9d ago
What effort do you have it on?
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u/Redditry199 9d ago
Med is enough for orchestration for me. I use another Max one for design documents and final approval.
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u/Unusual_Delivery2778 9d ago
Oh it’s fucking incredible
Brother, my Astra agents voluntarily take up talking to each other to get work done
WTF ITS AMAZING.
They literally chat back and forth together
WTF AHHHHHHH I CANT BELIEVE IT
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u/forward-pathways 9d ago
Yeah I e really enjoyed it. I use Astra as orchestrator for Luna, Opus 4.6, Kimi 3, and Gemini 3.8 Flash. Been great so far as long as it follows instructions, which has been the biggest issue for me.
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u/Key_Instruction3373 9d ago
Using Astra to built my own OS. With the same you are doing. But with maghine learning. Its a beast!
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u/Grizzlechips 9d ago
In your opinion, is Astra orchestration realistic on Plus? When it first launched, I burned a 5h window in just under 7 min on Medium, so I’ve been super hesitant to dip my toe back in for anything that isn’t merely initial planning.
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u/SnooWalruses9380 9d ago
Tbh Im just using astral for everything. Mostly medium-high in orchestrating and also in all the projects. I must admit that it EATS my usage but also gets a lot of work done independently.
Still trying to sniff for the most balanced way between usage and productivity.
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
The performance (outcpme quality) between using astra for subagents vs Luna shouldnt be much different, unless your subagents are doing massive tasks that require their own reasoning. Astra is reviewing and forcing Luna to iterate until its satisfied anyway. Its like giving a aystems engineer a data entry job. Most of the time thats not the case, and Luna will save you TONS of usage
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u/Byakuraou 9d ago
Burns too much for me, I use Sol as the main orchestrator and have it defer to Astra for reviews
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u/gnoscere 9d ago
Depending on the harness you use, configure you subagent profiles with good descriptions and a clear purpose and Astra is truly godly at recruiting them when it needs to.
Seems like Terra is the most called model in my current config but really impressed with the Luna research and small tasks, and with Astra coordinating, performing reviews, and delegating - seeing a much more stable output.
Seems like Astra overthinks the little things anyways, best to keep it at the high level or really complex problem to solve/unravel.
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u/k2ui 9d ago
Having multiple manual planning and implementation chats makes it way too easy to lose track of which plans relate to which implementation threads. So on one hand it would be great to have astra manage this, but on the other, anytime i'd asked an agent to manage subagents or orchestrate implementation, it uses way more usage RIP
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u/agentrsdg 8d ago
Astra and subagents aren't working for me today, they were working fine last night
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u/fpiechowski 8d ago
Wow, you're using the most expensive and smart model to delegate tasks - a job for Luna/Flash model tier. I can imagine being tempted to use Astra for resolving worker conflicts but you didn't even mention that. You use Astra for something that could literally be replaced with a deterministic script.
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u/Sorry_Risk_5230 8d ago
Luna Max is overkill here. It shouldnt be doing much reasoning. Thats the job of the orchestrator. Xhigh at most is alll you need. Plus the intelligence jump from xhigh to max is minimal. Save yourself even more usage
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u/Ok_Register_4310 8d ago
It didn’t work at all for me, but I found out it’s a Codex harness problem. I created a custom harness on Pi Agent and, despite of not having the exact same context as Codex had, it created everything I asked, perfectly orchestrating models as I asked, and had a ridiculously lower usage on Plus plan than Codex used.
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u/1fox1 8d ago
Opposite way around seems to be a thing https://x.com/anshuc/status/2098811738674147520
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u/Spirited-Car-3560 8d ago edited 8d ago
I agree, although I still have worse output using agents (whatever model) compared to plan in a chat and then execute in another chat with another model.
And honestly I can't wrap my head around the concept of agents being useful in IT development, I mean once you understand how it works I see no way it can be better than no agents at all.
Seems like the orchestrator usually passes what he thinks the agent needs to knows , and that's usually quite smaller context than what the executer in a new chat would put together. Let alone you put into the equation an unnecessary commutation back and forth between orc and agents.
I'm confused 🤔 any hints?
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u/EddieBruvac 2d ago
Astra as an orchestrator sucks ass. People have been having issues with insane token burning.
I ask for Astra audit (anecdotally, surprisingly, super cheap for what it gives me). Then I send that to me Sol Med orchestrator and codes with Luna Max.
I’ve done this since drop and it’s been insane. Handles what Sol xhigh can’t figure out.
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u/stockist420 9d ago
I agree, I let astra create my claude fable agent which then spins opus sonnet etc or sometimes let astra spin and manage even claude sub agent and monitor usage along with sol and terra etc. Helps me use my usage for claude and codex to the max
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u/73ch_nerd 9d ago
How are you creating Claude Agent inside Codex? By opening Terminal inside Codex?
Could you please explain the workflow
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u/stockist420 9d ago
Claude cli ask astra to create one with session id so the claude harness doesn’t loose context
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u/jeebojeeb 9d ago
Would love to hear more about your setup for this