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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

2.5x more expensive than Sol. Can expect 2.5x more usage in Codex subscription.

Sol is already brutal (even after their recent fixes, it's just a token-hungry model: I go through a full 20x account per day, on Sol Med/High standard speed, with ~2 threads).

Note that Tibo recommended using Sol Med as daily driver. When I'm doing less complicated work, I can't even make it past 2-3 days with Sol Med, whereas I was able to work ~80 hours/week with 5.5 High.

I hope the efficiency gains are true, since their token efficiency claims for Sol were bullshit. Sol needs a lot of rework on top of its inefficiencies so this could net out to less token consumption overall, if their claims are more accurate this time.

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The general efficiency of Sol has seemed way better to me. I left 5.6 Sol Ultra standard speed run for ~23 hours yesterday/today on a project and used 80% of the weekly usage. 74 subagent tasks and ~2.5 billion tokens for my $200 20x Pro plan. Meanwhile at work I used $1000 in credit and ran out my $200 plan for the entire month writing 4 much smaller projects with Fable 5 Max.

Both of these were largely about creating a personal baseline for what the best output the current models could deliver and how quickly it'd burn through the plans (spoiler: bad value vs taking even minimal effort in selecting the right sized model in the plan... but the output was still good). Particularly since I needed to burn a free reset anyways and my weekly reset was already near.

I obviously also hope Astra were dirt cheap but I'm more worried they won't develop/release powerful model options because people get upset they can't run them 5 wide 24/7 on a $200/m plan.

Jesus what are you doing that requires Sol usage so often?

Terra not enough? I know Luna isn't reliable, so that's fair.

Genuinely curious though, because I use Cursor daily and almost everything I do, highly complex or high volume, can be handled with Auto mode or Composer 2.5 (or Grok 4.6 High). So I have to assume you're doing something far more complex than what I am

Terra is not enough for many tasks - even Sol is not enough. That's why I'm eager for Astra.

I'm doing a lot of rearchitecting/refactoring and hardening in a large handwritten codebase; iterative performance and storage optimization (some areas I've been iterating on since January, with tremendous new progress unlocked by each new model release); offline-friendly, multi-device realtime sync with complicated requirements; and various natural language processing and other such problems that are essentially unsolvable but can become more accurate and better tested for accuracy through iterative work. Off the top of my head.

Some of these tasks involve a lot of code reading or other inputs, or reevaluating work. Token efficiency is no help there, if the input can't simply be skipped. Cheaper models are sometimes bad at summarizing or highlighting the right parts, depending on the task.

I also don't use subagents except for Luna. I'm mindful of cached sessions and start new ones often to avoid loading in full contexts (often with some kind of handoff doc or skill).

>token-hungry model

It's kind of funny how this is the exact opposite of the truth. It's one of the most token-efficient models ever.

The claims aren't bullshit. Every conceivable benchmark and test you can throw at it shows Sol being good for token efficiency.

It's highly dependent on workload

If Astra is per benchmarks so much more token efficient than Sol, why did they limit its use in ChatGPT to ~16% as many messages compare to Sol? When Sol is 40% the price of Astra, why do they give Sol Pro (in ChatGPT) 6x as many tasks?

If it were strictly true that token efficiency makes Astra cost around the same per task as Sol then there'd be no need to limit it to 16% as much access.

It's because per-task token use is highly variable, not as universally true as you claim

looping sol twice most likely.

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