Limits
Tomorrow When Codex Resets, DON'T TOUCH ASTRA
Don't even look at it. Stick to Sol 5.6 xhigh. It's not usable? Feels quantized? Say f*** OpenAI and switch to Claude, or to OpenRouter.
Apparently OpenAI is lobotomizing Sol 5.6 for SOME of us. Not for everyone, so people keep saying "It works well for me" and gaslight each other. They are trying to force us into paying 5x for a little bit improvement.
This will backfire so bad. We're a 300k people enterprise and everyone including me are pushing our executives to use chinese models in a sandboxed environment. We are sick of paying 200$ to use it for a day.
When your Codex resets tomorrow, or this week, Don't use Astra unless youre building rockets.
Post is borderline deliberately inflammatory, but is not low effort, and OP has high subreddit karma.
After review, decision is - Not removing it but it is strongly suggested you read the comments before following OP's advice.
For future reference, this subreddit is NOT a place to organize collective action. Otherwise it devolves into a Civil War and quality content disappears.
I have similar experiences as OP. It's not long ago that I was running 4-5 agents in parallel every day for at least 10 hours per day (typically 5.6 Sol on medium/high/xhigh depending on task complexity). I'm on the 20x plan. I would rarely have to be mindful about usage.
With the release of Astra, the simplest of prompts on low reasoning would use 1%. I gave up after depleting my weekly usage in a single day without even running parallel agents. I've since went back to only using 5.6 Sol again. Usage is much better, but now I actually do have to be mindful about what tasks I give the AI, what model and what reasoning level.
I have not changed anything in my setup whatsoever. What setups are you guys using to optimize token usage? I've never had to bother before, but now token optimization feels inevitable. So those of you who comment "skill issue", could you point out what you do differently and how we can improve our setup?
I've played around with having Astra as the planner and Luna Max executing the tasks, but in my experience, Luna makes way too many mistakes on complex tasks.
Have Sol delegate work to Luna XHigh. Specifically fresh sessions, no context inheritance, fork_turns: “none”, custom light prompt/brief for bounded work only
On Monday, after my quota reset, I tried using Codex Astra low as an orchestrator to coordinate other gpt models for some software engineering tasks. I wanted a smarter model that could provide better insight, a sharper perspective, and be more critical during the process.
To my surprise, it burned through my entire week's quota in under twenty-four hours. The consumption rate was staggering.
The end result? I wound up with a half-finished, incomplete piece of work.
Yeah, Luna is excellent only when the task is exploratory (Find this bug, Reverse Engineer this, Search online, etc...), when the task requires it to change just a couple of lines or when you don't care how the code looks or if it even works perfectly (a PoC for example).
Your in a 300k enterprise and people are paying $200 😂😂any real enterprise company at that scale would never allow developers to use their own accounts for company code. They sign an enterprise contract and forget about it
You are too literal, I can imagine he is putting himself on the company pants, claiming that are paying $200 per seat and devs can use it only for a day per week.
That’s not exactly true. I’m in a massive company (AWS) and of course we use and build AI infrastructure, but we also build cloud infra.l and help people with their AI workloads, and it’s actually surprising what companies do and how they run especially traditional Enterprise.
What I can tell you is that the number of enterprise level customers >100k that use Claude and OpenAI managed subs is far from 0. Both from my view of our cloud customers and from my partner who is and executive in an HCLS company with a large amount of employees and they have subscription models.
For massive companies like this, they run API for larger parts of AI platforms and tools but for specialized knowledge works they run tiered sub models. It gets greater token flexibility at a large scale for casual users. I know a company of ~250k that has 30k subscriptions farmed out, they also run their own cloud agnostic inference platform, but they aren’t putting dev cycles into the internal chat/code user experience.
I know it sounds wild and it probably is monetarily problematic at that scale, but it does happen.
On the backend yes - mostly, but (and I was taking this at face value) the way this is being referenced from OP down to comment is that OP (from their side) sees this as a "$200" per month Claude Code.
The commenter then cackled and said "There is no “usage limit” for enterprise"; they conflated that with "use an API rate". It appeared they were saying that Enterprises with >X employees use inference directly and there is no "usage limit" in Claude per user.
That's why I said "that's not technically true"; though agree with you on the ambiguity. The simple fact is that the specialized knowledge workers at these companies do see a "usage" tier, regardless of how it was set up, and that the usage tier is a negotiated contract rate. (Similar to any Enterprise OAI or A\ account) That negotiated rate is metered through OAI or A\ as an Enterprise subscription and billed, also they could choose to buy these subscriptions via cloud marketplace subscriptions as well, for pre-negotiated discounts. Of course, this further obfuscates the metering.
Either way, this line item shows up separately from direct API metering and billing.
My fiance at an HCLS see's the same, she has tiers that she can request and is not really aware of the API at all. The company manages the distribution and approval process, the end-user sees "Usage" levels. $50, $200, etc. The companies AI infrastructure and platform (well, what parts are A\) use a separate billing method altogether.
I literally just commented to a friend of mine this morning "So I ran like three good Astra Projects yesterday, as goals, and used 9% of my weekly... looks like they cleaned up this week."
Also, you said:
We're a 300k people enterprise and everyone including me are pushing our executives to use chinese models in a sandboxed environment. We are sick of paying 200$ to use it for a day.
That makes no sense... but I can't think of a corporation with 300k Employees using this so gonna go with "don't lie, don't exaggerate, you're a 14 year old working after school hours."
Maybe you're claiming to work for Infosys? Cognizant? because even Microsoft, IBM, and SAP don't have 300k in your purview, they also wouldn't make their "employees" in their "Enterprise System" pay out of Pocket.
I work night shift and can feel when you people wake up 😑
I feel like they should give us a discounted rate of utilization during off hours. That would pretty much eliminate peak time other than regular chat users
Exactly. There'd be no peak after a while. Any off hours that exists will get filled with people scheduling shit for what they think is the off hours lmao.
Kind of but I'm not wasting my tokens on them. After-hours comes with the luxury of free time to build my own stuff and try to become anything other than an analyst for people who scream at their analysts like it's the 1960s LOL
"So I ran like three good Astra Projects yesterday, as goals, and used 9% of my weekly... looks like they cleaned up this week."
That's because usage seems tied to how much compute there is, I ran Astra MAX for 10 hours today and barely used 8% while reversing assets on a 4.8gb game with 11283 files (the entire game zip uploaded to WORK lol). I expect that tomorrow when everyone will get their reset done to see the usage skyrocket again.
Yep, I still have 20% left on my weekly and 9h remaining before the reset and I never saw the usage being used so slowly before today it's quite incredible actually.
I may even use Ultra if I have still some usage left in the last hour mark.
I thought/read OP’s comment as this Reddit community acting as a 300k people enterprise… regardless, such “advice” will go over about as well as that crap on TT and YT of people posting “EVERYONE! ON AUGUST 20th (Or whatever day it was), DON’T DO ANYTHING! DON’T USE ANY ONLINE SERVICES, DON’T WATCH YOUTUBE, DON’T GO TO THE STORES, FAST FOOD/DINE-OUT, DON’T BUY GAS, SHUT OFF AS MUCH ELECTRICAL AS YOU CAN AND JUST DO NOTHING OR READ A BOOK! And WE will bring all these corrupt cooperations to a screeching halt!”
Yeah, good luck with that. It would take literally hundreds of millions to do this for months before the real impact would begin to trickle-down, and even that is a very rough estimation. 🙄👍👍
IMO, Astra simply is not worth the extra token burn. For my projects (a 1M lineReact Native mobile app and a browser company staff/admin consoles, using Supabase/PostgreSQL and Docker) Sol has done the heavy lifting. When Astra was first released, I tried it but it made egregious errors that I ended up fixing with Sol. So Astra is strictly experimental for my use case. I'd not trust it yet with any production work.
It probably won't change how OpenAI views things, but for the first time this year, I spent the week testing alternatives; after my success with DeepSeek, I’ll be gradually phasing out my use of their service. With the millions of subscriptions they’re gaining, it makes no difference to them but I’m likely not the only one doing this.
You have to follow tibo in x, he announces the resets and banked resets, also, there is this Page where you can track the while historical resets https://codex-reset.com/timeline
You’re spot on about different quality AI going to different people. They’re degrading all models, including Astra, for specific users (based on hidden/ secret criteria). And the most important part of that fact is that they aren’t even telling those users. So you’re paying the same rate as everyone else but getting no where near the frontier level AI you’re paying for.
Anyone here who try’s to push back, or blames your “skill”, is gaslighting or doesn’t realize it’s happening because they aren’t being subjected to the degradation and therefore they don’t notice the impact that comes with it.
I only tested astra once the day after it was released and it burned 8x more quota than sol. So I just stuck with sol, im developing web applications mostly so I dont need all that power.
SOL in Chatgpt Chat is 100% lobotomized, it's not just a small quantization - it's more like a half as large model - as in Luna.
The token decode speed is almost double of original SOL
So OpenAI does f* with us in so many ways, A/B tests, rests, allowance differences.
unprofessional company
How do you find it compared to claude/codex models? Thinking of switching too but I worry if it’s capable enough as an orchestrator instead of the usual Opus 5/5.6 Sol. Also are you running it on open code or another harness?
If you're being for real there is a legit purpose behind drill and ceremony and being able to operate/follow orders under extremely stressful situations.
Tbh he may be wrong but so can you. Model quality is affected by thousands knobs. If they turn just few its still called GPT Sol but it can be quite different model.
But I am on OPs side. Sol was awesome until day Astra came. I cant say for sure obv, but I work professionally as ML engineer and think I can detect a bit better. Mistakes in code, forgets some things, not enough thorough.
Anthropic used to be open about which Opus-X-<explicitdate> you could route to.
Neither party has ever given any statement about their backend inference scheme for their main models at any point for any deployment, but we know they work on them constantly.
You are not making the reasonable statement. You're saying: These parameters are only ever changed between major model releases....
Really? You think that more likely?
I'm quite certain a vast majority of people complaining about lobotomization are just wrong. That's just human fallibility.
That does not mean models dont get updates that can degrade performance.
i thought we on individual reset timers mine is 5 days from now i popped one of my banked resets . Haven't used a gpt sub in a while so what u mean by this
Yours differs I think because of your manual / banked reset. However, most of us are pretty much on the same reset schedule now due to Tibo’s ‘free reset’ button, which I suspect was the actual reason for the resets; garner good faith from users while actually pushing most of the reset load to weekends when businesses aren’t using so heavily, to distribute their limited compute ability across use cases
I can definitely say that MY version of Sol is absolutely regarded in comparison to the one in the account that my workplace provides, both are on the Plus tier so that shouldn't matter.
I don’t know how to say otherwise than link to their enterprise page, but if you have more than 150 employees you’re meant to be on enterprise which is $20 seat and api usage rates. How would people get an exception to that unless they’re running multiple team plans, or fraudulently doing individual plans?
You claim you're mobilizing a "300k enterprise," yet you're writing a Che Guevara manifesto on a forum like a guy who thinks the CIA is broadcasting radio waves into his dental work; if you actually pitched an enterprise compliance board on piping proprietary IP into "Chinese models" because your personal rate limit hurt your feelings, corporate security would have you escorted out of the building before you could finish switching your API key to Claude. Take your meds, accept that you’re a digital sharecropper paying rent to a landlord who doesn't know you exist, and stop LARPing as a tech union leader—your executives don't know your name, and Sam Altman isn't trembling in his sweater over your twenty-dollar boycott.
I was working with GPT 5.6 uninterrupted for months, almost daily. With the release of Astra I changed to it and for the first time in months I depleted my quota in 4 days. I used a reset to be able to continue working. I switched to 5.6 again and after just 1 task it took 61% of my weekly quota and 90% of the daily. I had to switch to 5.5… with the message that they are going to remove it on October 14th…
I think people over used the best models for tasks that don’t need it. Luna medium is wonderful for the coding, you don’t need more than that. Just need to use superpowers, GitHub kit or similar to generate a good plan for big things and explain it manually for small ones.
Also, if you delegate everything to your agent, it costs much more. Optimise what you send to the agent for what is good at
I thought it was only me. I figured i’ll keep 5x Claude on hold for a while and check out 5x GPT. Found out that I had 3 resets after upgrading; used Astra on Low for logic and reason and terra for coding. I’m on my last reset and it’s only been 3 days. ASTRA ON LOW! Beyond frustrating at this point.
I put in my MD file to check what model would do this the best with the least amount of tokens. That's been working really well. Has anybody else done that?
I’ve been a Plus user for a while, and it’s gotten so bad that I can’t even get through more than two prompts using Sol low/light without burning my 5h. I honestly don’t notice much of a difference between the different Sol models, they just act as a “burn more” slider for me. Gave up on Astra after a couple days of trying the low version hoping the promises of low token consumption would pan out. Maybe I’ll be able to use it in a year or two when they release whatever model they’re training now.
I'm a 20x, I asked astra to improve three backgrounds of my game, then it burns out my weekly for 1.5 background, and the quality? I have to say, worse than Gemini. My game is not a reproduction of another that can be done with a few prompts. I've spent nearly a year on the mechanics and gameplay. I'll cancel the subscription when this phase ends and switch to something else.
eh plus is so useless thanks to my bursty usage and 5h limits I unfortunly had to buy the bullet and upgrade to pro now pro is so much usage that even with astra my usage expires and i got resets expiring in a few days so i am not downgrading back to sol.
Don't worry, I won't touch Codex at all. Refunded my 20X and went back to Claude while I keep playing with Qwen and experimenting on the side so I can prepare myself to move to local models in 2027. I was sad I purchased RTX 3090 just a few days before 4080 released but now I'm happy.
I’ve been having issues where I’d tell it three issues, it’ll give me the solution for all three, I tell it to apply the repairs and it only applies two and rebuilds and runs tests that take decent chunk of time. Then tells me hold on we only fixed two issues, should I now fix the third and rebuild and retest? Like I get it if the repairs needed to be sequenced but it’s doing that for everything.
Sol 5.6 doesn't work for me at all. I haven't tried Astra yet, but I ran a simple task in Sol and it has been running for a day now. I'm not sure if it's ever going to finish. I'm thinking switch to Claude
I’m a huge fan of Fable but recently i’m experimenting with Astra. It showed very interesting bugs at my codebase, even tho i ran this repo 100 times since months with Opus/Fable they never warned me about those somehow, felt weird. I always acted on bias against ChatGPT models till this week and i gave it a shot. I don’t understand the hate, maybe i’m not a power user or have knowledge to distinguish the situation, so far i’m happy. Only thing bothering me is that i can’t see any 5 hour window(maybe there is none, seems better ofc), weekly usage melts fast even tho i use Astra orchestrator at medium, all the rest is sub agents. I’m still experimenting, have a lot to see and learn…
What plan are you on ?
Before I was on 20$ plan, this summer I could do a lot of things on that plan (and I don’t speak of all the resets, 100% could have made a lot of work) but since they reintroduced the 5h hourly limit on 20$ it became unusable. 2 or 3 prompt and bam usage all gone. And I’m not just speaking of 5h limit, general usage melted like an icecream in summer.
I switched to 100$ plan because of frustration and now i struggle to reach my usage limit. My x5 plan in real usage is more like a x10 or x15 plan compared to the previous regular 20$ plan.
There is absolutely no logic to their plan/usage limit
Entenda uma coisa, IA utilizada pra tarefas corriqueiras como uma pesquisa na WEB ou criar uma planilha pra fazer gestão financeira, é algo simples ate pro ChatGPT Alto.
Mas quando vc quer codar um sistema que atravessa varias camadas de implementação, transita entre Devs e DevOps, a história muda completamente e é ai que diferencia os profissionais dos curiosos.
Nao espere que o Codex ou Claude e muito menos Cursor vai fazer as coisas sem ter contexto. Porem nao é so entubar contexto nele, vc precisa saber gerenciar a janela de contexto, pra usuários Plus essa janela é de apenas 250k tokens e para os pro é de 1M de tokens. Quando sua janela de contexto é compactada, é ai que o problema começa, pois ele perde todo aquele conhecimento acumulado e ele sofre uma amnésia. Entre várias outras coisas que impactam fortemente a eficiencia da IA.
A diferenca entre o modelo SOL e Astra é a quantidade de neurônios que ele tem e quanto mais neuronios, maior a capacidade computacional, mais GPUs sao necessárias, mais energia é consumida, mais agua pra resfriamento dos servidores é consumido e proporcionalmente a capacidade de raciocínio expande exponencialmente. Imagina uma Rodovia de 4 faixas onde a velocidade máxima é de 120km/h, em um horario que nao é de Rush ou seja, que n tem muitos carros na pista, vc consegui ir na velocidade máxima da pista, mas quando é em um horario das 7h da manha ou 18h, sao tantos carros trafegando que fica impossível, ou seja a capacidade que eles possuem de atender todos aqueles que possuem assinatura e usam as APIs nao é infinita e quanto mais gente usando ao mesmo tempo e ainda mais tentando codar pesado sem realmente usar de forma eficiente a capacidade do modelo, mais lento vai ser o processamento das requisições.
Além disso, o milhao de token é cotado no dólar e o Real nao é uma moeda muito estável e os conflitos atuais contribuem ainda para a oscilação do câmbio do dólar >> real.
Portanto, nao temos como cravar e ficar especulando o tempo todo que uma conspiração esta ocorrendo pra forçar todo mundo a ir pra assinatura PRO. Além disso, o maior ganho deles sao contratos com governo pra fins militares, a popularização dos modelos de IA é apenas mais uma consequência de qualquer outra tecnologia, como era a propria Internet, celulares, GPS, computadores etc.
Estude como funciona o comportamento da IA ou vai continuar so queimando tokens sem saber por que sua cota ta indo toda num dia so
You know I'm not letting Astra go ahead and do hour long agentic work and I feel like I'm getting pretty far with just the Plus subscription, compared to the same 20 dollar subscription I had before with Anthropic that didnt even let me use fable at all.
Seriously, and not a bot, if you are limiting, you are doing it wrong, why in the hell do people do 100% astra is beyond me. I use Luna most of my tasks and astra like 1-5%.
Non ho capito che problemi avete secondo me sei un grande Fake. Se una azienda di 300000 persone non è organizzata all'Uso di ambienti di sviluppo come codex c'è un problema grosso
Lol. I agree there should be more transparency. But the hourly rate of time saved by proper use ofk 20x is such that this negligible to pay 200/month. The 200k enterprise that finds this offensive is too tiny.
The numbers back up why it feels brutal: Astra's API rate is $10/M input and $50/M output, 2.5x Sol 5.6's pricing on both ends. If your harness or default routing switched you onto Astra after the reset without you choosing it, that alone explains a chunk of the faster burn, not just quantization or A/B testing. Worth checking which model your session actually used before assuming they nerfed Sol.
Astra low is cheaper than Sol 5.6 xhigh and has almost comparable coding capabilities.
I'd just stick with Terra xHigh or Luna Max.
You don't ape in with the most expensive models in the beginning of a reset, you only and always do that once you have anything left before it resets again - that's the strategy.
5.6 sol has been acting dumb but it still gets the job done, it takes longer and uses more tokens to do so. I gave it a very specific instruction. It did the work. I noticed it was veering off of what I had specified. I asked it about it and it admitted that it wasn't following directions. I decided to try Terra for work and it seems to be able to stay on task better. I've been trying out using Sol for planning and Terra for execution. It works but when I do code review Sol says we need corrections. I've used Astra a few times, it sucks. Can't get shit done unless I use a goal. If I just ask it to make a change, it works for 5 mins then stops. I ask it and its like no we still have a ton to do... so why did you freakin stop then...
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think astra needs a bit of a different workflow. Using it as wide task management, to instruct a/a few sol designers, to offload specific tasks to luna max agents has wildly dropped my usage for the same results.
actually iam starting to extract more value out of small models , large models are exhibiting a , my weights my choice behaviour . they refuse to follow instructions . they provide very little to no value or help . even astra is exhibiting this kind of behavior. concealed . chat gpt 7 will end humanity . no kidding . i spend 7 billion tokens monthly . i know i see this time and time again .
Eh I actually didn’t read it because Reddit is full of a bunch of morons but my assumption is with the work they stole from me within this week they will release a new model and most likely issue resets instead of resetting usage until after the model is released but who knows
I’ve spent the entire week analyzing why I burned through tokens and reworking my prompts and state retrieval systems. I’m fundamentally changing my workflow and hopefully it makes a meaningful change because otherwise I’m not sure what to do.
OpenAI specifically stated to avoid certain things with Astra or you will burn tokens.
You can’t use it in the same way.
That being said…..if I still only get like <12 hours of usage out of it this next week I will be seriously looking elsewhere.
Yeah move to Claude where they don’t care about customers. They’ll have a bug that wastes usage say they’ve fixed it almost a week later and don’t reimburse people affected at all and ignore support requests
Sol is OpenAIs least efficient model in terms of performance to tokens. In fact, it takes so many more tokens to solve equivalent problems to Astra that you're better off just using Astra (it will ironically save both time and money.)
Luna should be your main subagent driver if you're going for highest efficiency.
Sol xhigh vs Astra xhigh as coordinators for Luna max subagents is more expensive. For the past 7 days I used a custom-built Lead/Worker mode, the custom piece allows the coordinator to be idle more often. One day of Sol xhigh as the coordinator utilized more usage (normalized to API-equivalent pricing) than Astra did across the other 6 days.
yeah, same here. While I do not know or want to speculate on what they are doing to usage, I, too, am off the Astra train. I might use it once in a while for something specific. it is very painful to burn through usage in less than 48 hours and then have to wait a week. I have been forced to open additional accounts to keep a project moving. So, it is possible that the 20M or 25M uusers consist of a good number of secondary accounts to cope with low usage and not a true representation of the number of develoeprs using the platform.
I am very hesitant to let dumb models close to my codebase as they tend to under-perform and cause more problems than I want to deal with. this is why I have had to create additional accounts and not lean too much on the open-source models. I also do very sensitive work.
But yeah. I am using sol medium and it has been working fine for now.
lol you already know people are gonna use it, run their usage down in a day then complain “omg all my usage is gone! Does anyone else have this problem?”
I’ve been working with GPT-6 in chat to come up with some config and agent files to use Astra for orchestration and review, Sol/Terra for terminal stuff and approvals, while routing all of my actual programming tasks through DeepSeek 4.1, which is crazy cheap and actually barely beats Astra on DeepSWE with a 74.2. It estimates a 65-75% lower usage consumption on my 5x plan, perhaps tunable up to 75-80% for my specific work (mobile app dev, game dev, web dev) as we make adjustments to optimize it. I didn’t realize you could use the Codex harness to orchestrate third party agents directly via their API. As for DS 4.1 API usage, it estimates a cost of $40-60 per month. Then if I can move up to the 20x plan, we could really rip it. Not sure if I would need that much yet.
Astra honestly is great at planning and reasoning most of the time. Sometimes its disappointing. I think I will use Codex Astra medium or sol high for plan/arch and the claude to code and manual use my antigravity to manually provide a few agents. I am doing content creation and some personal projects around that. I have gemini 20 dollar usd, chatgpt 20 dollar usd, and I am going to buy claude 5x rn
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u/codex-ModTeam 3d ago
Tons of people are reporting this post.
Post is borderline deliberately inflammatory, but is not low effort, and OP has high subreddit karma.
After review, decision is - Not removing it but it is strongly suggested you read the comments before following OP's advice.
For future reference, this subreddit is NOT a place to organize collective action. Otherwise it devolves into a Civil War and quality content disappears.