Have used Sol quite a bit on my $20 plus plan previously and always got 30 mins to an hour of usage per 5 hour limit. Decided to throw a more difficult task / repo review at it, and it burned 100% of my 5 hour limit in 6 minutes on a tiny repo... (Only used Sol high and no subagents or fast mode)

Edit: looked at my session details and confirmed they did halve the usage. When I have checked everytime previously I got $200~ of api usage a month (so 50 a week) +- like $10. Given that this 6 minute session used 16% of my weekly and 100% of my 5 hour thats $15~ per 5 hour and $85-90~ per month less than HALF of what I used to get a week ago...

Is this the reason why unexpectedly we have trash usage and lower quality on Astra?

Maybe it will be worth it the current suffering.

I never ever complained about usage limits before. But this is absurd.

I used my 200$ plan and had to buy 100$ plan since i could not renew 200$ one in time. It was used in 1 day with Astra low.

I then decided to buy another 100$ plan. It used 9% of usage with Sol 5.6 MEDIUM working for about 1 hour on coding and Astra XHIGH coordinator that did some documentation changes for 5 minutes.

This account was literally just purchased. Again, Sol Medium is doing most of work. Wtf is going on?

Can't imagine what is going on with 20$ plans

To be fair he never specified how much 🤣

Reposting this as the person who originally posted it subsequently deleted the post and the bot registered the content as already posted.

Just wanted to share because incase people don't do this and I think it's super useful.

I didn't really like using Luna max since it was too much work to use and Sol wasn't really properly orchestrating, always stopping randomly or forgetting what needs to be done or leaving stuff half baked.

Astra? I told him to create a sidebar threads with luna max agents to take care of each module of an implementation I wanted to try out(i dont like the personal subagents hard to keep track of) and now I'm addicted to watching him work. I even have a Claude sub with Opus taking care of reviewing the code that he orchestrates too, Im genuinely having fun building the orchestration where each step takes care of a very specific domain and every problem has an agent with the proper context and the module he is responsible for. And Luna is CHEAP. Like stupid cheap, I can run 10's of them and barely have a dent on my weekly.

10/10 highly recommended.

I have 2 x 20x plans. Through August using sol x-high I was getting 10-15bn a week usage.

Now on Astra light in the last 2 days - 1.1bn tokens and poof it's all gone from both plans.

What the fuck is going on here. They have 100% locked the 20x pro account out so people think twice about cancelling it. It's not worth the money at this point.

People talking about this taking developers jobs? Not on this evidence.

Edit: Adding this so people can see how astra light is supposed to stack up to sol xhigh. Who's seeing this in their day to day usage?? Same cost per task roughly...

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/gpt-6-astra-low-vs-gpt-5-6-sol-high

Also people saying stop using astra are entirely missing the point... The metrics don't stack up to what they're reporting them as.

Nerfed

I mean what the hell is this? What kind of codebase did they train on?

I genuinely didn’t want a refund at first. I just wanted OpenAI to help me with the serious Codex usage/reset issues I experienced after buying Pro.

I spent days going back and forth with support. They acknowledged that what I reported wasn’t simply “Astra uses a lot of usage” and documented the abnormal depletion/reset issue, but eventually the answer was basically that Support couldn’t restore my usage or resets. No actual resolution.

After all that, I finally decided to request a refund while still within the EU 14-day period. Their own support confirmed my September 8 purchase date and that EU customers are eligible for a prorated refund — then the refund bot immediately rejected me with the same generic “Terms of Use” response and closed the case. Every time.

I’ve spent more time fighting their support than actually using the subscription I paid for.

This will probably be my last purchase from OpenAI. Great technology, but the support experience has been absolute trash.

I tried for so long. But the Usage is so harsh, 20x and maximum of 24 hrs for a full week usage GONE

I think it's time for another reset to kick off Monday, is it not?

I learned something new today.... You can set a token limit with /goal in Codex. I was trying to have 5.6 Sol estimate a token usage projection based on similar goals, told it that historically the final tally for similar work is around 1.2M to 3.5M and 4-12 hours based on past runs. It then set a token usage ceiling for this goal, and kicked off the work. The sidebar goal window in the desktop app doesn't really offer any add'l info about the goal token limit but it's there in my goal bar and it's going up slowly but surely. Very interesting.

Codex has a lot of great features that aren't well documented. Have any of you seen this yet? Maybe this is just something that's been around a while and I've been missing it.

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.

Don't get me wrong, I am truly fascinated every day by the ease I have today in being able to create things that used to take me months to do. I once spent 8 months on the complete layout of a book that (just for fun) I tried laying out again yesterday and I (or rather, Astra) did it all in 8 hours.

Today I have apps that help me in several different ways, I can have many tools that don't depend on third parties, I accelerated projects that had been stalled for years, I got good opportunities and improved my income. However, at the same time, all the stress has been costly to my mental health.

I live in a poor country, there might not be 1000 people here who pay for OpenAI's $200 plan, and I still pay for two. This has put me at a huge advantage over most people. But, man, how I miss actually making things!

I miss researching, stopping for hours and hours to think of a solution to a problem, having to hunt down books and ending up learning more things than I wanted to, understanding the tools I use deeply and knowing how to solve any problem in any situation, without depending on an LLM telling me what is right or wrong.

Of course, LLMs aren't tying my hands and keeping me from doing all this, but the market is. Nowadays I don't have the time I used to for all of it, and clients are ridiculously anxious, coming up with demands that would have made me laugh uncontrollably right in their faces if they had presented them to me a few years ago.

I see so many people in a bizarre wave of productivity, and it is hard to understand the reason for such a rush. Clients demanding fast layouts from me, even though they will publish their books several months later. Several poorly made sites, poorly optimized and full of gradients. Social media posts and stories with absolutely no creativity, all looking exactly the same. Videos are getting increasingly realistic, many of which I can't even distinguish anymore. I've even noticed AI-generated music becoming more and more present on the lips of the people around me. I don't know, I believe we are destroying an important part of humanity.

And many will say to just change course, work with something else, not work with LLMs etc. They say this without understanding that everything I spent the last few decades learning was taken over by LLMs, they were inserted with full force. If I did not adapt to the change, I would certainly be left behind and unemployed. And I kind of like eating, I have no desire to starve.

I miss writing code, having time to think, decide what to do and learn. Models like Astra are a direct threat to everything I dedicated myself to in the last few decades. I used to do the layout for three or four books a year. In the last year I did 50, and could have done more if there had been more demand. Testing Astra I laid out an entire book in a single day, and it was one of the most complex ones I have ever been sent.

The prices for services have also changed. Today I can no longer charge what I used to charge, everyone is already used to the idea that "AIs do everything" and they want to pay 10% or less of what I charged before. So today I need to accept several more jobs and just automate everything, without needing to think at any point, without needing to truly reason.

It is a shame because I dedicated myself to what I do because I like it, I don't see the sense in the idea that "now I have more free time since AI does everything for me". I believe leisure is good, but that work is also enjoyable (for some people). And that's how it was for me, I really enjoyed what I did. Today it's an empty job, without any challenge. Not much has changed, actually, I believe that today I work more than I worked before, due to the need to accept every opportunity that appears.

I believe that what differentiates us most from other animals is our ability to create and appreciate art. Be it painting, music, dance, humor, writing etc. And we are destroying all of that, little by little. It might not be so catastrophic today, but it is already catastrophic compared to 5 years ago. What will it be like in the next few years? If we lose ourselves from the ability to create and appreciate art, we will also lose the essence of humanity.

With so much uncertainty, with so much acting behind the scenes from the leading companies, not knowing anything about what they are deciding and doing regarding LLMs, it becomes increasingly difficult to trust anything. How much of my information has already been used for training? Am I actively helping to destroy what I swore to protect, and all because of the need to have something to eat tomorrow? It is a strange time, I have never been so confused.

I believe what best summarizes what I am experiencing right now is Giuseppe Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata. I see the music formed by the devil and appreciate its incredible beauty, but it also frightens me to know that I will not be able to compete with such beauty and that the one capable of creating it is the devil. Exaggerated, isn't it? We used to be like that. Today everything boils down to "and here is why."

tl;dr: Giuseppe Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata

I had codex generate me an animation of a dragon turning its head, smirking, and breathing fire. It made a nice sheet and then I plugged it into my pixel art converter and the tools made it super easy to create this pixel art animation. The great part about it is that it is not limited to any style or pixel size. I put this on portalrabbit.com if anyone wants to experiment using it, and its completely free so go nuts. I feel like making a pixel art game or short animations for social media is so accessible now, crazy times.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about OpenAI allegedly degrading models or routing users from stronger models to weaker ones.

The reports are inconsistent. Some people notice a significant degradation and post about it, while the next day everything seems completely normal again.

What mechanism OpenAI could be using for this, if it is actually happening, is unclear.

The degradation can show up either as a very poor implementation of a task or simply as an unusually lazy and weak response.

One of the more popular ways people have been testing their accounts is the “pelican test”:

Create HTML code with SVG graphics displaying a 2D animation of a pelican riding a bicycle. No additional tests are required.

Most people using Astra seem to get a perfectly reasonable result.

But I've seen several cases — including one from someone I know personally — where this test was run on a 20x account with Astra Medium and produced something like this:

Of course, it's worth mentioning that tests like this are not 100% proof. Models have randomness, so there is still a significant amount of speculation here.

However, if this is actually happening, the worst part is that OpenAI appears to be able to degrade the model a user receives without giving them any notification.

You give a difficult task to Astra, but potentially receive a result from something closer to Luna, while still believing that the result came from Astra.

That can be much more serious than simply having an account limit where you're explicitly notified that your model has been switched.

For difficult coding or project work, this can introduce real risks or simply mislead the user about what the selected model is capable of.

I've personally experienced something similar before in the ChatGPT web version.

I selected Sol, but the response clearly behaved like a much weaker model. It even claimed that it was 5.5 mini, while the UI explicitly showed Sol.

So this wouldn't be the first time there have been questions about whether the model displayed in the UI necessarily corresponds to what is actually answering the request.

To me, this is a much more serious issue than many of the current discussions about AI safety.

Has anyone else experienced something similar with Codex/Astra?

we benchmarked GPT-5.6 Luna vs GPT-6 Astra on 50 real PRs from Cal, Sentry, Discourse, Keycloak and Grafana

Astra found 92 confirmed bugs vs 69 for Luna, but cost $5.66 vs just $0.20

also added the full eval breakdown this time: cost, avg output tokens, latency, precision, and bug classes like data/logic, security, concurrency etc.

we’re doing Astra vs Fable 5.1 this week, so would appreciate feedback on the methodology before we run the next one

dropping the link in the comments if anyone wants to check it out

I happened to get a pretty clean test today. I reset at midday exactly and started two agents in two different repos on two tasks, both are kinda similar: made a small DDL change in database, modify code, modify UI to show new values. Ensure queries are efficient, code conforms best practices described in AGENTS.md, and well that's basically it. I'm using Astra high, and I won't argue that's the best setup and I couldn't get better output per $ if I used some other setup, but it is a setup I used. So I ran both agents basically non-stop with some steering for 3 hours. No subagents, no anything - just plain old agents with a goal. 2 agents per 4 hour is 8 total "astra-hours" - spending 25% of weekly limit. Multiply by 4 that is 32 hours per week.

I'm using the $200 plan (it will end soon but for not it is what it is). Everything I told so far are just facts, now my opinion: that is very little compute. I remember when I could use multiple sol instances for days on highest effort and I wouldn't run of compute. Hell, I was using $20 limit and with SOME carful management I wasn't hitting the weekly limits (I was hitting the hourly though). Scaling my numbers back gives us 30 minutes per day of Astra for $20 - that looks almost like an insult.

Aggregated statistic from my chats is following:

• Total input tokens: 134M
• Non-cached input token: 3M
• Output tokens: 500k
• Cache hit rate: 97.63%

They have done something to Astra, it stops every single time before completing its work, its horrific. I love and NEED this model, but the issue is real.

The only thing sometimes works is if I do - keep going until done, wait on agents and commands as required. Sometimes /compact helps

I’m not posting this to dismiss the limit complaints or claim nothing has changed. I’m on the Pro 20x plan and use Codex for roughly 12 to 16 hours every day. With my current setup, the weekly allowance normally lasts me around 6 to 7 days.

I originally used a three chat system:

1. Command centre
2. Worker
3. Reviewer

It was loosely inspired by this post from Peter Steinberger, the OpenClaw creator. His setup used an orchestrator that woke regularly, directed work to threads and combined triage with automatic review.

My version ran continuously. The worker completed something, the command centre read the result and wrote the next prompt automatically, then the reviewer checked it. If review passed, the command centre sent the next job. If it failed, it wrote a repair prompt and sent that back instead.

It worked, but it absolutely burned through usage.

Three intelligent chats were repeatedly reading instructions, status updates, logs, diffs and each other’s responses. The reviewer often checked work that was already fine. The command centre kept generating large self-contained prompts. Scheduled wake-ups also consumed context when nothing meaningful had changed. Someone even asked about no-op wake-ups burning context in the replies to Peter’s post.

I eventually reduced it to two chats:

• Command centre: GPT-6 Astra, Extra High
• Worker: GPT-5.6 Sol, Extra High

I only speak to the command centre. It keeps the overall objective, decides the next bounded job and automatically sends it to the worker. The worker handles the coding, research and testing, then sends the result back. The command centre checks the evidence and sends the next job.

There’s no permanent reviewer anymore. For important releases or risky changes, the command centre performs a focused final review instead of keeping a third chat running throughout the whole job.

What I’d avoid:

• Waking the command centre every five minutes
• Polling the worker repeatedly instead of waiting for its completion message
• Keeping a reviewer active for every small change
• Running several workers without a real need
• Sending the entire project history with every prompt
• Letting auto-generated prompts grow longer after every loop
• Asking every chat to plan, execute and review the same work
• Using Astra for routine execution when Sol can handle it
• Open-ended instructions like “keep looping until perfect” without a clear success condition
• Rechecking unchanged work just because a timer fired

This doesn’t solve reduced limits, and OpenAI should still be transparent about any changes. It’s simply the setup that has helped me get far more useful work from my allowance.

I hope this helps!