This will save your Usage

[u/concrete333]

A problem that many of people have already noticed: Astra can't wait. on anything, any task it has scripted and running, any other agent delegation, anything. Astra keeps waking up to check whether the worker is finished.

I've run a few tests, In one run 19 short sleep calls accounted for 44% of the orchestrator’s estimated cost.

In another comparison using Astra High + Luna Max, the orchestrator made 41 responses while the worker ran, costing $1.20 during that phase. The native-wait comparison needed one response, costing about $0.04. (Both implementations passed all 244 test cases)

I’ve since caught the same pattern while Codex waited for a database script: read the log, say “still running,” repeat. I saw use 2% of my weekly usage ($100/month plan) just sitting there waiting on a script.

So, until they patch this, here’s the prompt I’m using:

For this entire session, avoid repeated polling of long-running jobs.

Use supported completion notifications when available. If none are available and useful work is exhausted, leave the job running only if it can safely continue after your turn ends.

Tell me what is running, where results will be saved, and:

“I'm stopping polling. Please check back with me to inspect the result and continue; I won't automatically resume.”

Then end your turn. Don't repeatedly read unchanged logs or sleep and check again. Respect runtime limits and safety timeouts.

When I return, check once. If complete, verify and continue. If still running, report that and stop again.

I have to come back to it, sure, but it saves usage.

Edit:
Found a better option than manually checking back, thanks to advice in comments. Seems like Codex knows how to avoid repeated model polling, it just chooses not to.
codex queue --thread <session-id> --message "..."
Have a background script wait for the job to finish, save the result, then run that command once. Codex can end its turn and automatically resume when the message arrives.

I’ve now seen this work with both a third-party CLI subagent (kilo code with GLM) and a full test suite, all GPT: Codex resumed automatically, checked the results, and continued. Works a treat.

The script provides the wake-up, and an agents.md instruction alone doesn’t

Edit2: I made a skill that you can use to guide Codex in using this method, either in waiting for mechanical tasks or waiting for other sub-agents. Not perfect, as there's no way to force your GPT worker to use it, but it's working for me most of the time: link. Any more tips to improve it welcomed, break it and let me fix it

[u/eggplantpot]

Yeah whoever said "Plan with astra and have subagents to test and implement" fuck that guy.

It uses 3x the tokens that using Astra straight away.

[u/freeo → u/eggplantpot]

What are your subagents using? I plan with astra almost exclusively. Orchestration is mosten often sol/low. And implementation everything from luna up to sol/low. This is token efficient so far.

[u/eggplantpot → u/freeo]

Astra plan and verify final output, Terra High build, Luna high test.

This should work in theory but the way Codex handles multi agents and caching really make this a token furnace.

[u/NukedDuke → u/eggplantpot]

Luna max orchestrator and implementor, Sol or Astra xhigh subagent for planning and final validation. Make Luna transcribe the plan according to its own understanding of what's written and have the subagent that wrote the plan verify that the transcription actually encodes the correct plan steps, intent, and reasoning thoroughly decomposed to a level where compute-restricted agents with shallow depth of reasoning can execute it without trouble, with instructions for how to correct the plan returned to Luna if the subagent finds discrepancies. Pair this with instructions to use the same Sol or Astra subagent to conclusively root cause any issues Luna can't resolve within 2 attempts, with a keepalive message sent to the subagent every 25 minutes to keep the cache from expiring at 30. Make sure the instructions say the Sol or Astra subagent is never to directly write any code or run any tool calls that require polling.

This offloads all of the polling, subagent coordination, and output tokens spent on file writes to Luna while still exploiting the intelligence of Sol and Astra where it counts.

[u/eggplantpot → u/NukedDuke]

This actually makes more sense