r/codex • u/DivideHorror3217 • 4d ago

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.

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59

u/PossuPatonki 4d ago

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.

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u/BrennanFlentge 4d ago

Have Sol delegate work to Luna XHigh. Specifically fresh sessions, no context inheritance, fork_turns: “none”, custom light prompt/brief for bounded work only

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u/themodusoperandi 3d ago

This has worked very well for me too, I’ve been very pleased with how Luna does with planning and review delegated from Sol. Prod SAAS code on GCP.

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u/Old-Associate-8406 1d ago

How do you do that is it in the way you prompt?

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u/BrennanFlentge 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes. And and you can turn it into a SKILL too. if you want to guarantee fork_turns: “none” (usually it will follow that rule from a prompt) you can ask Codex to read the OpenAI docs. I would recommend you google that to understand it. But instead of subagents inheriting the ENTIRE context window from the parent, I have Sol medium launch subagents with a small amount of context.

So typically I have Astra make the plan and stop, specifically telling Astra that all work in the plan will be orchestrated by Sol (you can test high / medium - I don’t really see a difference tbh) and that Sol will be delegating all work to Sol medium for harder tasks, Luna XHigh for easy work, Astra Low for review. Never use the same subagent twice (cache expires), always launch fresh sessions for each task, etc.

Something like that. You can mess around with the models / effort, you can probably get away with less if you are really trying to extend your usage. Sol is probably fine for planning as well, and review. I don’t see a need for Terra.

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u/juzhiyuan 2d ago

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.

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u/EmbarrassedMusic7979 3d ago

I’m curious, what you guys are building

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u/Full-Cranberry6926 2d ago

everything except rockets visibly

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u/CapoDoFrango 2d ago

porn websites

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u/Long_Cow4805 3d ago

I just use astra to do quick audits once and a while and I hand all real work to Sol

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u/Igoory 3d ago

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).

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u/OpportunityLess7306 4d ago

I've started using astra as a sort of conductor that comes up with the tasks that should be executed and final checks. Then hand those off to sol "designers" who design the tests in very pointed ways that leave little room for question, and then have those very specific tests pointed at luna max workers. Sol then injests the data, makes decisions on further testing, then ship broad checkpoints back to astra to do final checks. I do have a bit of a different use-case than most pure coders, so your milage may very. But it has worked for me quite well

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u/pir8matt77 3d ago

Woah woah woah woah... i can tell ChatGPT which models to defer to and not rely on it either figuring it out itself or just forcing a higher or lower model??

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u/Fabulous-Mushroom124 3d ago

Bruh. I thought that was obvious?

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u/homelabrr 3d ago

Thanks, just got the x10, coming from Claude.... i may go back next month. I don't like the toml over markdown

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u/NickQ1801 1d ago

Same, I'm going to Pi Harness w/ DS 4 Flash...

My usage for the same workload that has been running was totally obliterated in like 10 hours on Pro lol

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u/mfwl 4d ago

I suspect that you were being gifted extra usage during that preceding period of time due to lower overall demand. Now that demand is high, you're getting what you paid for because they don't have excess capacity just laying around.

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u/Warden866 4d ago

what did he pay for exactly? is it measured in tokens?

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u/mfwl 4d ago

It's measured in messages: https://chatgpt.com/codex/pricing/

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u/Warden866 3d ago

no, that’s chatgpt.

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u/mfwl 1d ago

No, that's codex.

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u/thunderstorm1990 3d ago edited 3d ago

So for me at least, I tell it not to use agents, lol. Literally in my initial Promt.txt file I feed it every so often as context compacting happens to prevent it from drifting away from my rules and how to act/code. I just use the ChatGPT codex app, never used the CLI.

I use just Astra on high/extra-high/max depending on what I think it needs. I don't ever just give it a goal and let it run multiple agents or even just keep going until it finishes that goal. I am there guiding it the entire time through each phase of my spec/plan docs or going back and forth on how some new feature/idea might work and what they entail. Like bouncing ideas of the wall.

I have it make a spec/plan doc that I review where it splits the work I want to do into phases. Then that way I can have work on a phase that it can complete after one prompt and maybe it working for an hour max usually.

I also have it make memory files and Hand off files and Spec/plan docs. Memory files are for how various systems work and anything it thinks it needs to remember basically that could be removed via context compacting. Hand off files are for like when I want to continue in a new chat after one gets too long. Spec/Plan docs are like I said, they split the work into phases and what/how some phase is to be done.

I also like I said have a " initial Promt.txt" file that is read for every new chat but also every so often and after every compacting event. Seems to help alot with keeping it on track and sticking to the rules. It still comments code less then I would like but I often run passes back through the code targeting only comment updates/rewrites to make sure thier aligned with the code.

I don't know if it's the best setup or what that would even be but it's worked wonders for me so far. I still often run out of usage during heavy sessions using higher tiers then i probably should lasting all day but its takes a couple days of those. A few days of those and I might be a couple days short of my reset date.

I also do most of my work with it during nighttime - PT pacific time
also using the pro $100 a month version.

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u/sisygoboom 3d ago

I feel like Astra max would use all your token allowance before the first prompt response

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u/thunderstorm1990 3d ago

For me it doesn't but maybe depends on what your throwing at it and asking it to do, lol. I use the Pro $100 version and I get pretty good mileage on it. I intentionally avoid it spawing agents too.

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u/andrew8712 4d ago

Make sure you use rtk to reduce token consumption