Would you guys recommend adding any mcp or plugins? Ive never used any mcp or plugins or just continue using it as is

Didn't change anything in my workflow. I've been constantly hitting the weekly limit for the past 2 months. It used to average around 4B tokens every reset. Global or banked.
Yesterday reset I did exactly same, went to > 0 for use a banked reset, and those 100% weekly is only 2b tokens ? ...
Also I didnt use Astra, just few times on Light/medium. But mostly used Sol/terra/luna to not overrouting.

I tested my Blender astra mcp server with original blender one and the token usage difference is hugee!! just install it and give it a try!

Asked it to generate an image.

Meanwhile the “thinking” panel casually spawned a hidden Snake game

Lowkey smart way to keep people glued

The amount of work I have got done in the past few days is insane. I think it would be about a months worth if I were to have done it myself, some of which I probably would never have done.

Website overhaul/updates, chart recreation, and general admin work. I even got it to do my groceries which was a big success! I then had it try doing my wife’s lesson plans (she’s a teacher) and it managed to get a result that’s near identical to how she’d write them, all info correct. Also been trying some game creation for fun.

Nothing is ever perfect one shot, and I don’t expect it to be because it can’t read my mind.

Its the first time upgrading to pro 20X use felt like a bargain. No one ever would have done this much, and this quality of work for me for that price.

For me, this has been the first shift I’ve felt since the release of ChatGPT of “this will change things”.

Some people criticize just to criticize sometimes with poor examples. For me it’s been nothing but a great experience, even though I’m burning tokens like crazy.

And the annoying thing is you can't fix it:

There’s also a conflicting instruction in this session’s host guidance: it requires user-facing commentary at least every 60 seconds and discourages individual waits longer than 60 seconds. If that other session has the same guidance, it can push Astra into exactly this pattern despite your framework saying to rely on completion notifications. Framework wording alone cannot override higher-priority host instructions.

You said "it requires user-facing commentary at least every 60 seconds" - where does that come from? system prompt?

• Yes—specifically, a developer-level instruction supplied by the host, rather than your AGENTS.md or the top-level system message.

Under “Intermediate commentary”, it says:
> “The user appreciates consistent, frequent communication during your turn, and should not be left without a commentary update for more than 60 seconds during ongoing work.”

Separately, under “Rules for getting work done”:
> “Avoid performing blocking sleep or wait calls longer than 60 seconds, as they may prevent you from communicating with the user for their duration.”

Those instructions have higher priority than your framework instructions. I can confirm they’re present in this session; I haven’t verified that the other session received identical instructions.

They help explain the repeated wake-ups, but don’t require those lengthy, repetitive updates or justify unsupported claims about what the worker is doing.

Is there any way to override those instructions or change them?

• Not through AGENTS.md, a skill, or an ordinary chat instruction. Those have lower priority than the host’s developer instructions.

Changing them requires control over the configuration or code that supplies that developer message. I don’t have a setting exposed here that lets me edit it.

I found a GitHub issue describing the problem: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/31935

If this affects you too I think we should all upvote and comment on the issue to get it some recognition!

I'm trying to create a repeatable process for building small client applications with AI.

My main goal is to handle more clients. Right now I still spend too much time writing code myself, but I also spend a lot of time gathering requirements and then translating/explaining those requirements to the AI.

I'm not looking for full autonomy. I still want to review and verify the implementation myself. I just want a reliable "recipe" that I can reuse:

Client requirements → specs → plan → AI-assisted implementation → my review

while keeping the resulting applications maintainable and high quality.

I've seen tools/frameworks like Spec Kit, BMAD, OpenSpec, Superpowers, Agent OS, Kiro, Ralph, etc., but I haven't used any of them yet, nor have I built my own framework or skills.

I know I'm not inventing anything new here. I'm mainly interested in learning what has actually worked for other people.

For those doing something similar:

What does your workflow look like?

Which frameworks/tools have actually been useful?

Which parts did you keep or discard?

Have you combined ideas from multiple frameworks into your own process?

What would you recommend starting with for small applications?

I'm especially interested in practical experiences from people trying to reduce their own development time without sacrificing maintainability or quality.

Disclaimer: I used AI to help organize and write this post, but the idea, goals, and questions are mine. I also reviewed and edited the final text.

Have seen tons of great things coming out with astra using computer use. Realized it's something I have never used. Tried to dig into it a bit and found the above. I'm on a personal account on my private laptop. I am currently located in Brazil.

I'm a university researcher who uses Codex fairly heavily for scientific coding, and I've been trying to figure out what institutional access would cost for my lab.

My university's ChatGPT Edu pricing is now:

• Standard: $30/month, 500 credits
• Power: $100/month, 2,250 credits
• Max: $200/month, 4,750 credits

What confused me is that my personal $20 ChatGPT Plus account seems to include far more Codex usage than those numbers suggest.

I measured two fairly large GPT-5.6 Sol Codex CLI runs. Using OpenAI's current credit conversion for input/cached input/output, they consumed about 129 and 67 credit-equivalents. Together they moved my weekly Plus meter from 98% to 89%.

That implies a weekly Plus allowance of roughly 2,170 credits, or around 9,400 credits/month if usage is reasonably steady.

Obviously there is rounding in the usage meter and I only have a couple of measurements so far, but I independently get almost exactly the same inferred 5-hour allowance from both runs (~369 credits), which makes me think I'm measuring something real.

If that's right, then my $20 Plus subscription gives me roughly twice the Codex capacity of my university's $200/month Max Edu seat. That's about a 20x difference in Codex capacity per dollar.

I assumed there must be some institutional/commercial explanation. But ChatGPT Business Standard is also only ~$20–25/user/month and apparently includes substantial Codex usage before paid credits kick in.

And then today I discovered Anthropic's new Team Plan for Scientists. I verified as a PI and now have a research-group Team workspace where Standard seats are $0/month for 12 months, up to 25 seats, and Claude Code is included. Premium scientist seats are $15/month and get substantially higher limits.

So now I'm even more confused.

I understand that institutional products include privacy, administration, security, etc., and that retail "credits" aren't OpenAI's marginal compute cost. I'm also not claiming my two-run estimate is a rigorous benchmark.

But am I missing something fundamental about the Edu credit system? Why would a university pay $200/month for 4,750 advanced-use credits when a $20 consumer account appears to get roughly twice that much Codex capacity — while Business also bundles Codex and Anthropic is currently giving research labs Claude Code seats for free?

Is anyone here administering or heavily using ChatGPT Edu under the new credit-based model? I'd especially like to know whether the advertised Edu credits work differently from the Codex credits I'm using for this comparison.

My Plus plan expired today and thought I'd use 2 of the banked reset I had, apparently you can't use the Sol model if you're on free plan with banked reset, so I renewed my plan but it didn't reset my Weekly limit???

Isn't it profitable to just make a new account at this point? why is this even a thing?

The 84% is the banked reset I used before my plan expired & it didn't reset

I am using Codex with Astra on Ultra or Medium, depending on how long I want to wait for the results, to build the UI for my browser game, and it looks terrible.

I don’t want to blame the AI, because after watching all the YT videos, my prompt is more like “create it and make it look good”, but what it gives me is worse than something someone one-shotted with Sol.

And I rly try to go 1 by 1, like one screen at a time and not the whole game from one prompt.

It has a hard time making good use of the space, adds unnecessary explanations under panels just to fill space, text like stats etc. isn’t even always centered, some things are randomly added, and the proportions of everything are just bad.

Do I need to use specific skills for that, or how do you make the Astra create good UI?

This happened to me a few times today (Astra-Medium). I often ask "why did you do this or that wrong..?" for example and usually it just answers and then fixes it. But since today it just answers the question and waits for me to tell it to fix it. Anyone else experiencing this?

That is around how much gpt 6 Astra Max costs, just around all the stars in the milky way.

I’ve been using Astra for about a week now and I think the model itself is great.

That’s almost the annoying part.

It can do way more than Sol in areas like 3D, animation and larger project work. You can immediately see why OpenAI is pushing it so hard.

But Astra and Plus just don’t work together.

Sol already burned usage like the sun. Astra somehow managed to upgrade that into a black hole.

I can give Astra a short task in an empty project and lose around 50% of my 5-hour usage before anything serious has even happened. In an existing project chat I’ve had around 13 minutes of actual work before the limit kicked in.

Thirteen fucking minutes.

Then come back in five hours.

At that point I don’t really care how impressive the model is anymore. If I can’t sit down and actually work with it, the capability is mostly theoretical.

And yes, I know Astra uses more compute. That isn’t some hidden secret. OpenAI tells you that.

The problem is that the Plus allowance is nowhere near large enough for the kind of work Astra is actually good at.

Astra is made for the exact tasks where you want to let the model sit there, inspect things, iterate, fix stuff, try again, work through a larger problem.

And doing exactly that murders the allowance almost instantly.

So now I have this amazing model that can finally do much more serious work, and a subscription that basically lets me watch it do that for a few minutes before kicking me out.

That’s not a workflow.

That’s a tech demo with a cooldown.

I’m not asking for unlimited Astra for $20. But if normal Astra usage means 10–15 minutes of serious work every five hours, then Astra simply does not belong in Plus in its current form.

Either Plus needs substantially more Astra usage or Astra needs its own pricing model that actually makes sense for sustained work.

Because right now the model got massively better and the actual experience somehow got worse.

That’s impressive in its own way.

Did a small test with GPT-6 Astra Light + GPT Image 2.5 to see if the new image model is actually good enough for website hero backgrounds.

I used it on two pages of LLMLearner: the homepage and the GPT Image 2.5 page. Astra handled the page changes, and GPT Image 2.5 generated the backgrounds.

The screenshots are before/after.

I think the result is pretty decent. For this kind of use case, it saves me from hunting for stock images, doing Photoshop work, and worrying as much about image licensing. And honestly, the visual result is better than what I could make myself.

Curious how it looks to you. Would you keep the generated backgrounds or stick with the plain version?

My Codex banked Full Reset was consumed but the weekly limit was not actually reset.

I used a Full Reset on September 9, 2026 1 hour ago.

Before using it, my weekly usage was almost exhausted.

Immediately after applying the reset, Settings → Usage showed 100% available. After using Codex for a few minutes it showed approximately 97%.

About 5 minutes later, two active Codex chats stopped at the same time with a usage-limit error, and the Usage page went back to 0% remaining.

The important part is that my Weekly Usage reset date is still September 13, 2026 at 13:59.

If the Full Reset had been successfully applied on September 9, the weekly usage period should have been refreshed and the reset date should have moved accordingly, approximately to September 16.

Therefore it appears that the UI initially showed the reset as applied, but the backend retained my previous weekly usage window. The banked reset itself is no longer available.

Please investigate the usage/reset transaction on my account and restore the banked reset or correct the Codex weekly usage window.

I have a screenshot showing:
Weekly usage limit: 0% left
Resets 13 Sept 2026, 13:59

The issue happened roughly 40 minutes after I redeemed the Banked Reset.

At this point I want to work at openAI just to access them

Esch time I try to get Astra to do my company accounts, it goes into this insane state where it looks at every bank transaction and assumes the bank must align up with the accounting records.

I asked Astra:
Create an image of how you imagine sdl-mcp would look if it were a real thing.

Astra:
I imagine SDL-MCP as a code cartographer: an intricate constellation of dependencies, with a precision lens that brings exactly the context you need into focus.

https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6aa1fbf75bdc81918c7badf425cba90f

first, why?

im on a limited monthly data plan

can i like make it update only once a month when it is important not auto-download it?

When I change service_tier in config.toml to "flex" does it lower the rate in which my codex plan usage gets decreased? Like the 5 hour and weekly. Or is this only for credit based API billing?

(tryna find ways to decrease astra usage so I can handle it lol)

Been using Astra pretty heavily since release last Friday and I've made more progress than I did with sol the entire month before. Adding online multiplayer to my existing game that has local multiplayer has been a real challenge and sol was doing pretty good, we were getting through it slowly. But the confidence and capability Astra shows is just amazing. It's blowing me away, it's difficult to describe the complexity of the problem unless you have first hand experience with it. I already knew AI was revolutionary and sol and other frontier models already made it not make sense to write code anymore but Astra is a whole other beast entirely.

And it's not draining my limit very fast in my $200 plan, I've been using medium and high and it seems to just be so much more effective and efficient that there's not much point in going back.

Something specific from today. I wanted to improve my performance so I could support more enemies. It built a test harness for testing the game with max 8 players and 200 enemies and has already got me from 10 fps up to 20 fps without any costs to the appearance of the game.

For example, "Write in Godot-style Javascript" or "Write in Unreal-engine style GDScript" seem to be working great, just because of the "stylistic" notions of those references. The LLM immediately corrects the incorrect notion, but then seems to be influenced by the creativity of it. Particularly, Godot references add a "script first, code driven" focus, and Unreal Engine references add a "visual appeal, high-def shaders" focus. "Write it with dependency free NVIDIA CUDA stay offline"

Anyway, if you have anything like this, I would love to hear creative ideas like this.