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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

I mainly use Codex/Sol to review my plans drafted by Fable. But beyond that, Astra blows through usage limits too fast to be a daily driver and writes weird code despite what my "house style" is, and Codex is behind Claude Code in terms of critical features like seeing what's going on in subagents.

The parent + subagent workflow has become critical for keeping the reasoning agent (parent) context-lean while also letting me chat to the main agent while work is getting done.

My main process is to use Fable to reason and then spawn Opus subagents, and I get amazing results, and I'm always looking into what the subagents are doing.

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Astra is:

- Unbearably slow

- A token eating machine like no other

- Constantly compacting

- A model (like other GPT ones) that hides thinking traces and thinking summaries, which infuriates me

I've been in the Claude camp for a while, but the way it writes has left me with a a brick for a brain and wanted to see if Astra was as good as they say. Well, I can't know, because in the time it takes for it to actually build anything useful, I've moved to other ideas.

Unbearably, annoyingly slow. I keep thinking I must be doing something wrong.

It also feels slow for me and compacts often.

However, it is not a 'token eating machine'. In fact it uses a third of the output tokens of Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, or Opus 5.

17k for Astra xhigh vs 61-66k.

You're right, it's probably quite unfair of me to say it eats lots of tokens when I am paying double for claude than codex and complaining about tokens.

The rest still stands, though.

But if I've learned anything is that in a 2 months I might have completely turned around, who knows

Have you tweaked the reasoning level? “High” can mean different things across different models.

The thing is that this thing is constantly compacting.... I get 1M context with Claude and ~256k with Astra. Even if the compaction loses much less information on OAI's side, it takes so long it's barely any use for me...

I've tried High and Max. They have produced decent results, but they're so slow.... I will try to lower it a bit and see the difference, but it's a delicate balance: I don't want to waste literal hours on the incorrect reasoning level to only then have to spend those hours and tokens to do it right.

At this very moment, Astra has been working for 1h15m on a task. At this rate I genuinely expect it to take about 10 hours. I feel like claude would do it in at least a third of that. Let's see if the quality justifies the slowness (it better)

If you want a mix between both codex/claude code/pi for leveraging different models and harnesses, you can give ai-devkit agent orchestration a try

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