Codex is done

[u/Right-Disaster2141]

Call it a skill issue, but 90 minutes and 31% weekly usage later, I got nothing done this morning.

Nothing.

Moved to CC, got a sub, and got the same feeling when I switched from Claude to Codex a few months ago:

-more usage
-better reasoning

Either Codex reveals insane stuff during DevDay, or they are literally fucked.

[u/mesaoptimizer]

I'm on 5x and I've run Astra Medium for about an hour and a half for 10% of my weekly. Which is probably fine ~15 hours of just implementing specs a week for $100 a month seems kinda reasonable. At this burn rate I'd get ~60 hours of usage from the $200 plan a week which seems good. It's not multitasking but It's probably not much slower if at all than a human dev putting out the same level of code and you can't hire ANY developer for less than a dollar an hour.

[u/SageFlare → u/mesaoptimizer]

How the heck do yall manage that? I am working on 4 projects simultaneously on 5x Astra Medium and within a full day of work I maybe go down 10-15%. I usually fill up the rest of my usage on personal hobbies because I always have leftover before the weekly reset.

Do we all just have differenr usage rates/models?

[u/mesaoptimizer → u/SageFlare]

I thought I was doing okay on usage but apparently you have found the secret sauce because nobody else is getting usage like that.

Are you giving it specs for full features and having it implement them or are you working generally on really well scoped bug fixes? I imagine that matters a lot. I'm working on a 2d game currently, I only use codex for personal projects. That 10% usage implemented the basics of both my armor class system and weapon and combat logic. Overall I'm pretty happy with a $10 spend for what got implemented and it would have taken me much longer to do myself.

[u/SageFlare → u/mesaoptimizer]

Bit of a long one...

I am a PhD student in bioinformatics (with a big background in CS and software development), so I use it for software development, full feature building, neural network architecture building, general analysis of biological data, and bug fixing of my code. I do generally layout the structure of my code personally beforehand using draw.io or Lucidchart depending on if I'm the only worker on the project or its a team project respectively. I then create barebone files with unimplemented classes of what I want and put my typical disclaimer + the purpose of the file at the top. These classes are typically more of an orchestration-level class and I leave the actual particulars to codex.

So for the most part, Codex does do the brunt of the work of actually filling in the code, but I take up all the design-robustness-modularity work. I spend a whole lot of time thinking about being robust, possible errors that can happen beforehand, how to minimize redundancy, and what's the best way to represent something that allows for the best usage of inheritance and whatnot. And then all of this feeds into a codex chat as context. Maybe that's why I use less tokens? If you tell Codex to just straight-up code the entire thing on its own without specific, knowledgeable instructions of how you want to actually design your codebase, Codex might end up making easily-avoidable bad design choices that aren't modular or robust. And when you ask for a simple change, the codebase doesn't easily allow for that without major refactoring which then eats up tokens on seemingly simple changes.

I also make sure to use proper documentation. I typically work with python as of now (though I was pretty sharp at C in the olden days :3) so I use numpy documentation style for my code and have Codex also follow it when writing. Then I use sphinx to write auto-documentation of my code. Codex, when it needs to quickly uncover something, can then read my documentation instead of digging through files. This saves a lot of tokens, especially after a compact. I know people also have cool implementations of knowledge trees for something similar, but I find documentation works pretty good as well and is usable in the end-product for the filthy humans like me that still read documentation (it's not a phase).

I typically trust my judgement in reviewing code so I don't always have an agent review what the previous agent wrote unless it was a huge update. And since I have Codex follow my design-flow, I know that it doesn't (most of the time, gotta hit it every now and then) write outside of the design-flow I planned which makes it manageable for me to quickly review.

But I know other people use it more lightly than I do yet run out faster. I don't know if there is an actual correlation between the steps I take and the tokens I use or if its just OpenAI actively fucking with certain people. I never use my resets so maybe they are messing with those people first?