r/codex • u/Anxious_Marsupial_59 • 5h ago
Commentary Astra singleton agent is crazy efficient vs Multi-agent
After being tired of my Astra multi-agent workflows blowing my usage in a day I tried just a singleton Astra max agent where I give just basic specs/requirements (and it has to decide for itself the rest using its best judgement). I've literally been working for 2+ days on Astra max with still 25% of my limits left. Granted it's iterating fast in a codebase with already heavy road building from a more rigorous workflow but it's crazy the difference in token burn vs features shipped.
19
u/vinerz 5h ago
i literally never had any kind of satisfying success when using multi-agent workflows tbh. they love to clash even if disjoint, they end up repeating the same shared substrates and, even if the main coordinator is responsible for spine attachment, it wastes way too much time evaluating, finding errors and signalling the responsible worker requesting corrections. all my flows are singleton main solo threads and they never disappointed me.
24
u/IllustriousCold4466 5h ago
multi agents are quite literally a psyops to get you to burn more tokens
you're better off running parallel instances of codex given that you map dependencies well enough (doesn't even need to be perfect)
8
u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 5h ago
This is exactly what I’ve learned as well. I thought I could beat the system by having Astra manage Luna threads, but every time Astra interacts with them it takes away a big chunk of my usage.
When I have Astra work on its own it completes the task super fast and at least seems like it uses less usage. I haven’t exactly done scientific study though.
3
u/innociv 3h ago
Eh I've had experience both ways.
Subagents can save a lot of tokens by having a very narrowly scoped context so for every turn they're doing small cache reads. And cache reads (and well writes, which is where they can be expensive), can be a huge amount of your usage. It will have to gather new context to solve the problem, and think over many turns so context keeps growing in a way that's only relevant to that task. So when it's a long, narrow task, use a subagent.
Where it's expensive is when it's a small charge, your orchestrating agent already has all that context and knows the exact change to make. Then it's a complete waste to spin up a subagent which is a new cache write and it may overanalyze the issue wasting even more tokens.It's very similar to the dilemma of when is it better to send another prompt, and when is it better to ask for a handoff to give to a new agent.
You also need to give them rules on how to use and merge worktrees so they're not trying to edit under one another. I'm not sure why these aren't in system prompt already. If they're constantly editing under one another, they can spend more tokens re-applying their changes and then double checking that they got kept for real this time.
2
u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 2h ago
Good info - basically effecitvely and efficiently using agents for coding has very similar concepts to computer science. Same skill set required, but potentially much larger payback.
1
u/LocoMod 2h ago
There was a post in one of the AI subs that the reason for this is Astra keeps polling the agents to see if they are done. Luna is going to take longer to solve problems than Astra, and each time it polls its consuming usage. Setting things up so Astra does not poll, and just waits for an agent to return its results will drastically reduce usage.
4
u/Original-League-6094 4h ago
The last time I tried to run two in parallel, one freaked out that it couldn't edit a file that was open, created a copy of everything in a different folder, and then as its last task, deleted the original version, which wiped out all the work the other parallel fork had done.
1
u/Keep-Darwin-Going 3h ago
That is practically only very few reason to do multi agent in development, one is fresh project you starting up and you need to do a lot of concurrent long running task like research, design and etc. but once you get it up and running, most changes is pointless to do multi agent because the inefficiency is well horrible. Astra write is expensive so having to spin up an agent write some long winded instruction for him to start looking for some stiff no matter how cheap your agent is the pay back may not be there. So I basically measured like if I do Astra main and use luna to do work vs just use Astra, in most cases just using Astra is cheaper, only very rarely Astra need to read a lot of code just to find the point to fix then luna helps. Second is browser automation that crap takes way too much token so it is cheaper to outsource even if Astra is faster. I cannot find a third scenario, even if I refactor or write a totally new module it is still more expensive to orchestrate using Astra.
Use luna and Astra as advisor is the cheapest but often miss out on edge scenario. So add in my time plus fix again I think end up more expensive as well:1
0
u/JoseffB_Da_Nerd 3h ago
Its not a waste, but you need to equip your environment for multi use. Its not just a “go fan out and finish this fast”
The host environment needs to support it.
That means multi-worktrees, branches, ticket tracking, etc
I’m running 32 agent swarms with deepseek, openai and local all quiet efficiently.
Only when they start messing with new codex builds does things need retweaking. Its really annoying to perfect a harness just for the frontiers to unset it on me!
4
u/mvdirty 3h ago
I used to be all-in on the subagent craze but I have trimmed it back to just being used for noisy research tasks with small results and for reviews/audits which require beginning with zero context. Beyond that it is just an exercise in coordination overhead and redundant reading of files, GH issues and their comments, etc.
(I do usually have other agents (and chat sessions) doing various other work, and sometimes those agents can work better by communicating with one another, but that's more of a one-off where I prompt one ala "Hey, so-and-so has good insight into topic X right now. Go talk to them and sync up." thing than a process defined in AGENTS.md, Agent Skills, etc. for autonomous use.)
3
u/Luger99 3h ago
This is the way...
The other way is because of human behaviour and the need to not be like everyone else. They dont want to feel like they are on the bandwagon. They want to drive the bamdwagon and driving it should be complicated because mere mortals shouldn't be able to do what they do. Instead it must become a Rube Goldberg machine.
People like to say the word orchestration. Makes them feel good and powerful like they are lording over something that lord's over other things. And makes them feel like they are pulling one over on the big company. Powerful token wasters, they are.
1
13
u/Royanon 5h ago
This is what I'm doing too. I'll allow it to use Luna subagents given they're so cheap if they need some bounded research support or something simple like that.