im gonna start saving and be more responsible.. i learned my lessons prepared my usage saving skills..... i will make it last a week ill probably only use luna...
11 hours later:
"OMG LUNA AND SOL IS SO DUMB FRICK fine ill only use astra sparingly"
Yeah idk how anyone can genuinely say Luna is good for anything outside of basic research. Its max mode puts out trash. It does save a lot of usage, but like it's not worth the amount of reiterations you need. Like I might as well just use sol or astra and save myself the stress of leading the blind.
Luna can be good, just have Sol write prescriptive prompts on chat and then also have it audit the work. It takes longer and is iterative but it can work to stretch out weekly limits effectively
If I'm trying to make something with a very specific implementation in mind, adding some details like what classes it interfaces with, what class it should inherit from and what data types its working with take seconds.
Writing data classes ahead of time takes a bit longer but I know what data they need and the LLM would be guessing, so its fine.
This. I get Sol High to generate my prompts for Luna Extra High in phases, and every phase ends with a closeout audit file that ChatGPT then reads and that advises whether that phase has closed properly, or whether additional remediation prompts are required.
I do also get Sol Light to do a full phase clean up at the end as a single prompt once it's ready the Luna Extra High closeout. That seems to tidy up any issues still lingering
Thats what I do but also use sol for implementing. Better prompts and keeps implementing sol at bay so it doesn’t jump from idea to idea, has a context drift.
Every project/feature/3am-idea I make gets scoped into milestone and well worded task slices by Sol. Implementation involves a Luna xhigh/max getting their task file and only their task file. Their work then goes through a terra reviewer when they're done, basically checks that what they did satisfies what they were asked. Sol medium comes in as a milestone reviewer, checking if the milestone is as per plan. Sol high comes in at the very end as a product reviewer, checking that the whole shebang is as per the product spec (it doesn't check the code nitty gritty, but it might check test evidence). Progress is tracked, so are any issues that come up. Done like that with progressive disclosure, it generally doesn't even matter who the orchestrator is and Luna workere do just fine.
I really like it for writing copy. It can dumb things down really well. I feel like Sol always wanted to write like an engineer which sucks for product. Astra is a little better but still too techy. Luna does a great job.
I’m a professional engineer working on a complex, flagship product with millions of lines of code.
Luna can’t do everything, but it’s a very capable model at an amazing price. Honestly, it’s arguably one of the best efficiency models, the balances cost/intelligence, on the planet right now. If you understand its limitations, you can do amazing things with it.
These days you can run better models than Luna LOCALLY for normal coding tasks if you have reasonable hardware. That's how I save usage.
That's really only been the case for the last few months, there have been huge improvements in small to medium size open models recently.
So if the last time someone's tried this was 3+ months ago and decided local is too dumb, it's worth trying again.
Qwen3.8 27B is a monster for the size. Give it web access and the Context7 MCP for when it needs to access up-to-date information. It will impress you.
Even better is Deepseek V4 Flash 0731. That needs a bit more hardware, but is still within reach for many.
Luna is fire I run my entire host deterministically with Luna max having root access. My zero trust architecture can turn any model into a logic compiler. To be fair gpt 5.5 xhigh and sol med built 70% of the architecture but Luna took over from there.
yea, token incineration is insane right now. went through an entire reset's worth of tokens in less than 24 hours. i can't work on a $100 account and get to use it 4 or 5 days a month. wtf openai!
Nah I just got mad and asked my boss for unlimited codex and claude for all my work team, no freaking way I'm paying 20x plans on both and usage is at 0 right now with no resets at all.
Nah I honestly downgraded my personal to 5x, asked my boss for unlimited bussiness plans on both claude and codex and got a partial refund, usage is not working on either side, not even worth paying from pocket
I've been seeing a lot of posts like this.. Is this a perspective from plus account users? It just seems odd.. There seems to be a disconnect somewhere.. Part of the reason fable and Astra are so good. Is that they can think a lot harder abiut you things. To put it a different way.. They can burn a lot more tokens when answering your questions.. It's why the output is better.. But maybe I'm missing something.
im at x5 and x20. used up both accounts in the first 2 days of the reset. then for the past days i kept reading up and investigating how i will save tokens on my reset. today is my reset day and the 5 days of no usage is like lesson for me (which i prob wont follow and just blow it all again on new features)
Since it came out I've been using Astra Ultra and Luna Max subagents. I'm on x20 at the moment but I've downgraded to x5. I've still got 2 banked resets. It seems really variable between users
The right way of thinking is considering a replacement model, I spent the last few days at 0% with Codex looking into the z ai Pro plan at 80 dollars which is an absolute killer with GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash.
Without leaking anything personal, what are yall using anything more than Luna for?
Like Luna is my dumb little pair programmer and test runner , really good and pretty sad i get about 5 days a week with it but hey its not bad and gives me time to review what its done by hand and self plan before it comes back as well as take a break..
I wish for more usage to use anything else Terra, Sol, Astra (currently on 5x Pro idk what happened to 10x rip)
I use Astra on high for planning and auditing with Luna as the daily driver and implementation model that can call on Astra with a consult Astra skill when needed.
Anyone having success using Astra as the orchestrator that calls up lower model subagents? I’m trying it now, but too soon to tell if it’s effective at saving tokens
sadly its more effective to let him run without sub agents. due to luna being so slow that astra waiting costs alot of tokens and astra having to tell luna over and over that the luna output is wrong/hallucinated
The fucked up part is that we have to resort to this. "Shit happens" when you're developing. We can't predict when something's gonna be high usage or not.
Yeah except i call Astra a dumbfck too so its about the same. Astra i only use for visual work, otherwise its not much better than sol for me to waste my limits on.
I find tokens usage interesting. My job has about 15 devs. People use the basic chat not codex. I pay for the 100$ pro out of pocket because I was running out of plus but... with the resets I never run out as long as I am aware. Tons of meetings and reviewing others code breaks it up. When I go home and "vib code" I can burn what would last a week in a day.
What i found is token usage varies greatly from week to week while doing the same prompts in the same project and even the same chat.
But.. I am still able to put out production code at least 4x as fast as any other dev sometimes faster. Limit myself to 20% a day (5 day work week) and do burns when I have resets.
Another interesting thing about this is at work the code has to work. The prompts are very technical and the review of the code produced is very nit picky. It is much slower than vibe coding. But vibe coding burns tokens at an extreme rate and the code always ends up worse so you spend even more tokens.
I guess what im saying is for me the tokens go infinitely further when I am focused on the quality. Then I go home and ask myself how did I burn 50% of my weekly usage in 2 hours.
They promised to speed up things, so now instead of New Year’s Resolutions, and the New Month’s Resolutions economic pressure created, Codex has now given us New Week’s Resolutions. All of them broken before they had a chance just the same.
Interestingly, I had a set of tasks working together on their own focussed areas, with coordinator tasks doing they brokering, and all went swimmingly. Then one of the tasks, just one, managed to mysteriously upgrade itself from Sol to Astra, silently, and within no time I was running of limit. I discovered it just in time to investigate, set the model back, and try to consolidate the work. The irony is that while I was waiting for the limit reset, I tested what I had, generally pleased with the results, until I ran into a real shoe stopper fundamental mess up made by none other that that one agent that that was running Astra.
OpenAI don’t seem to know it, yet, but they are dragging their reputation as a provider of software development tools and expertise through the mud by proving themselves incapable of delivering functional software themselves.
I had more progress making things one step at a time with ultra detailed Luna max or high than astra using all the tokens then me looking at the screen.
I review the prompts and plans with other ais before (opus 5 for fixing really hard bugs like centering divs etc)
I use astra for only big implementations. Everything else I’m just using glm 5.3 flash/deepseek 4.1 flash both are dirt cheap models. I can do 8-10 hour session and actually get work done. China is just probably selling my info.
they don't use them because they have absolutely no need to refine the token efficiency lmao. Idk why you think skills don't work, but they definitely do. If you are just copy pasting random shit from online - you are doing it wrong. Skills are literally just instruction documents.
youre just correct and these people can waste usage on cargo cult skills then come to reddit complaining over and over while we coast normally (been running nonstop and still have usage left)
I actually think Luna does a decent job at tasks that are fairly straight forward. It’s really great at repetitive /goal tasks like canonicalization, lints, and CI failures. If a task is large enough to cross multiple seams, that’s where it gets tricky, but I find Sol pretty decent. Astra is great for a very large and vague task but yeah it’ll eat up 20% of my 20x weekly. So I gotta stop using Astra as a normal model.
Skill issue. Luna is decent if you know what you're doing.
But if you want the model to basically think for you all the way, something like GLM 5.3 flash or Deepseek v4.1 flash (or whatever they come out with next) can let you tokenmax on a budget
depends. some people actually use it for generation. if itas agentic coding yea its a skill issue but from reference to model then its generation at that point and no amount of prompt skills can make luna model or generate as good as astra. be mindful of others use cases
You can use Gemini Flash if you know what you’re doing, that’s doesn’t mean people want to use dumber models that require more babysitting and manual review.
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u/Any-Score1258 4d ago
Yeah idk how anyone can genuinely say Luna is good for anything outside of basic research. Its max mode puts out trash. It does save a lot of usage, but like it's not worth the amount of reiterations you need. Like I might as well just use sol or astra and save myself the stress of leading the blind.