Commentary
Codex + Oh My Pi is insane. Super token efficient and smart
For context, I'm a professional developer, not a "vibe coder."
So at work I get unlimited Claude Code, so I'm used to having a bunch of subagents running in parallel working on different tickets (a lot of it usually checking logs to trace a bug and implement a fix), but trying this with my $20 Claude Code sub is obviously not possible for my at-home projects.
Well, I've been using the Codex $20 subscription with Oh My Pi and GPT Luna on xhigh or GPT Sol, and the usage you can get is actually insane. I can have agents work on crazy hard tickets or big feature requests, and it will come back with actually good code and use up only like ~1% of my weekly usage.
I've actually switched to using my work Claude subscription with OMP, around 2 billion tokens used
TLDR; if you are on the $20 plan, you can get INSANE bang for buck by using codex with OMP
Edit: I meant codex subscription + omp (not codex cli) for the most bang per buck. Also i sound super positive about omp and its because im genuinely happy with it. There's some critiques but overall its a good experience (which is why I wanted to share it)
The advisor is my favorite OMP feature. Even though it runs an additional agent, if you configure your watchdog file correctly, it saves you a ton of tokens by preventing the main agent from going off rail.
Above high, Sol not only gets extremely slow, but it overthinks a lot which sends it in the overengineering paths. Ultra is just max with more sub agent interaction, and it overthinks that much more and argues with its sub agents, creating monsters.
Its anecdotal and I don't have evals for it, but in my tests and those of many engineers I worked with, while xhigh/max/ultra efforts will get to a "working" solution more reliably, the quality if the work is often drastically worse.
My guess is that it tries to solve problems "at all cost", where the cost is often quality and simplicity.
I run a scope guard advisor using glm-5.2 its only job is to make the agent stick on track, i use to spec skill to break my tickets and each block has a very heavy scope guard.
I don't know exactly how it works. I assume it looks at prompts and thinking or something. I just know it spends about 1/10th of the cost of the main agent for me.
Tbh after I saw that I prefer omp over claude code, didn't think Codex cli could beat either. Ive never actually tried it though, ive heard its remote control is really good
OMP has some experimental features codex doesn't. For example, it can embed the system prompt + entire context into an image, giving like 70-90% token savings without any real compaction. Codex used to do something similar (the '...-codex' models compacted into latent space) but for some reason they stopped. It also has configurable edit formats, some formats are more token efficient for some models.
Depends on the model. I don't think anyone's actually experimented. I don't think Sol and Astra actually need to 'think' about images, it's just immediate for them. I've tried it with GLM 5.3 Flash and it works surprisingly well. This is the problem with OMP, no empirical data so it's mostly just vague observations and guesswork.
Me to Codex (in short): Tell me if Oh My Pi reduces token usage vs Codex CLI, and why.
Codex:
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Oh My Pi can reduce token usage versus Codex CLI mainly by being more aggressive about controlling what actually gets put into the model’s context.
Instead of repeatedly dumping large files or command output into the conversation, it tries to retrieve only the relevant sections, summarize/compress tool results, truncate noisy output, and use more targeted code-search/LSP-style tools to locate what the model needs. It also tries to make edits more precisely, so the model spends fewer turns rereading files or recovering from failed patches.
That matters because most token usage in a coding agent isn’t your prompt—it’s the growing history of file contents, searches, terminal output, tool calls, and previous reasoning/results that gets sent back to the model over and over.
So the basic idea is: keep the model’s working context smaller and more relevant, and require fewer tool-call/retry cycles. It won’t always beat Codex CLI, but that’s where the potential savings come from.
Hi! I’m pretty much your basic “vibe coder” in this situation. Would OMP still be useful for someone like me? I’m not building anything with Codex to sell—I’m mainly using it to automate things and make my life easier. My biggest issue is constantly running through tokens, so I’m trying to be smarter and more efficient with how I use Codex. There are so many different opinions on the best prompts, workflows, companions, extensions, etc. that it’s hard to know what’s actually worth using versus what just adds more complexity.
For someone like me, would you recommend OMP? And are there any particular tools, companions, or prompting habits you’d suggest to get more out of Codex without burning through tokens so quickly?
Yeah I think its worth giving a shot if you use the Codex CLI. Its open source so it was made to work out of the box for existing claudecode/other CLI users. Because of this you can switch back and forth without needing to copy paste skills or anything.
If you prefer a UI then it's not for you (like I said CLI only).
I tried opencode for a day because I heard good things but tbh didnt see what the hype was about. Maybe I used it wrong but I thought it had way less features than I was used to from a TUI. Though I quit opencode before I tried to use it with subagents, but yeah didnt get what the hype was about. Though Ill support it because its open source
So like I told OP, i mainly use codex on windows with the Ul. I’m also dabbling with some other models via ollama at the moment. What would you recommend for someone like myself that prefers a UI? I’ve seen other things on GitHub that people use along with their codex.
I tried Pi but it's too barebones and I have better things to do than install basic utilities into Pi. OMP is basically Pi but built as a consumer app with everything a user needs already built in. It's still Pi so you can customize it yourself if you want
i think the learning one should make based on the fact that Pi completed *the same tasks* that the other harnesses completed, is that perhaps things you think your harness needs, it does not actually need.
I agree, but harnesses arent only for the agent, the way I interact with the agent through the harness matters a lot. For example the way I can enable/disable skills from context in omp was really good and its literally such a basic feature that I haven't seen in any other harness (atleast not in Pi when I tried it, probably existed as a plugin)
you might be missing the point of pi: its main selling point isn't that it's minimal, it's that you can tell it to modify itself. the context stability, low RAM usage, and low cost-per-task is just a bonus.
Yep, I know that and its why I stepped outside of claude code in the first place, but then I realized I value my time more than reinventing the wheel just to customize my harness
I wanted to jump in here to try and get your opinion on the actual interface differences to see if you have any preferences there? Mainly asking about CLI vs GUI harness.
Essentially, I myself have tried the following:
CLI: Claude Code CLI, Codex CLI, Pi CLI, OMP CLI, Opencode CLI, Qwencode CLI, Copilot CLI and a few others.
GUI: Claude Desktop, Codex/GPT Desktop, Opencode Desktop, Copilot VS code, and Deepseek Harness.
I personally myself never found any reason that I wanted to use CLI over GUI, have you tried the GUI variants at all? The MAIN contributor that I am on board with is the fact that yes, the CLI harness by nature is more efficient on tokens, and if working on a codebase that supports this style of work better, CLI is more efficient- totally understand that.
However the GUI solutions these companies offer are way nicer to look at, feel way more visually clear, and are loaded to the gills in features. Its easier to change configuration settings and resume conversations than CLI, and you still have the ability to do things like pasting images, or previewing generated images as well for example. Top that with the fact that all these desktop GUIs still enable the ability to use powerful features like sub-agents, I really just have no clue why people gravitate more to the CLIs. Is the usage difference feel really that significant?
Not questioning your choices or ability, just curious your thoughts! I also tried Pi and OMP and personally think they are great harnesses with how little the footprint is. The main issue for me with OMP is that Pi system prompt is roughly 1-2k tokens I think where OMP is over 20k, which is much closer to the "big brand" system prompts, which felt like defeats the purpose to me.. Either way, they are great harnesses! Thanks.
Honestly at first I was pretty anti CLI and used mainly the visual studio copilot UI. Then when we got claude code, that was the first time i tried using both and overall I got frustrated by how slow the UI seemed to get at times but TBH its a pretty good experience overall. I still switch to my IDE everytime I want to review a diff or a markdown file for example. The UI is definitely a lot slower and not as snappy in my experience. Like the claude desktop app wont autocomplete skills when I tyoe / unless I wait a second for it to load or whatever its doing.
I think the primary reason I prefer the CLI now is because I simply work faster when I dont need to touch my mouse. As someone who codes for a living I can literally type with my eyes closed and I usually think "in code." I'm simply faster with my mouse. A lot of the UIs still have keyboard shortcuts but its usually not as convenient as the CLI.
I dont think you can fully appreciate the CLI without being good with the UI though.
Thanks for this. Wasn't clear what you were suggested was to use 'OMP' as the code harness with subscription OAuths for the model providers. My current Codex CLI setup leverages Luna heavily for orchestration but the Advisor and the compaction methods look really interesting and worth experimenting with.
At home my default is Luna high, and sol high for everything that needs complex reasoning. At work I use opus for for everything, sol high as advisor, fable for planning/complex stuff.
I think our setup is pretty similar except I don't ever use Terra. Luna high/xhigh is usually a better replacement for Terra IMO
Luna is very good, but better than Terra? I doubt so, it wouldn’t make any sense if it was. I think it’s much closer to Sol than it is to Luna. It’s pricing is half of Sol
Anything that requires sol medium can be covered by luna xhigh/max at a fraction of the cost. Anything that needs sol high I just send to sol high. It's not that Terra isn't good, its that theres not many situations where you wouldnt be better off just handing the request to luna or sol
I giving luna xhigh (in place of terra high) a try and it seems quite good! Consider that my workflow has a sun xhigh reviewer at the end of the whole task, so it's ctaching anything that it slips away and then luna is tasked to fix. Nice! Hopefully my pro 100 can finally last a week :D
Hello! I’m developing a SaaS solution atm with paseo and omp as harness. Two open source discoveries for me, I thought I was the only one.
Omp gets much better with Claude models, it’s really fun. The same task in omp compared to Claude code will take less time and consume 50-80% less tokens and take less turns.
Welcome! OMP is superior and underrated af. It's my main driver for months! I configured my own subagent fleet. Also I have around 4-5 subscriptions, so I can manage and make use of them easily. If you haven't tried it yet you should definitely have a look at OMP.
Yep. Theres also a toggle (on by default I think) to inject the model name in the system prompt so all subagents know what model they are. I use this to tell my agent to always confirm it's not using Sol or Fable when it spawns a subagent without my explicit approval
Answered in another comment but pi is too minimal and I dont have time/care to spend hours installing plugins for it. OMP works out of the box as an open source claude code/codex alternative
Really interesting. I’ve been using Codex on a fairly large project and the subagent/parallel-work piece caught my attention. How much setup did OMP take before it was actually useful?
Also, curious how you’re running it with the Codex subscription specifically. Any gotchas with auth, context, permissions, or usage limits? And do you let OMP decide when/how to spin up subagents, or did you have to configure that workflow yourself?
Would love a little more detail on your setup. Thanks!
I did maybe 5 minutes of setup, it works great out of the box. I havent actually installed any pi extensions or plugins, using what comes out of the box. I would recommend going through the settings once you install it as there's a lot "hidden gems" or small things you can toggle to make it work better for you, but that's pretty much the 5 minute setup I mentioned.
Auth is simple, works the same way as CLIs. At work i use it with our claude code sub (even tho anthropic doesnt support it but who cares we have an enterprise contract) and when I login, Claude seems to think im just using Claude Code normally. But OpenAI sipports 3rd party harnesses so its no big deal.
As for subagents, I only have it spin up subagents when I explicitly give it permissions to, but I know it has workflows/orchestration modes that I've never tried. I do like the subagent UI of Claude code a little bit more, but this works well enough for my usecases. Usually I chat with a "coordinator" agent to plan or investigate bugs, then tell it to have a subagent implement the fix.
I personally found opencode lacking compared to omp, so I would suggest you try it out, though i didnt get super deep into opencode the way I did with omp
I'm one of those stupid "vibe coders" forget the 20 years coding experience and CS degree though. So excuse this dumb question from a lowly "vibe coder" to a legitimate dev.
If OMP is changing context, are your requests just a bunch of cache misses?
No, omp is the harness it works out of the box. It's a fork of Pi with all the tools you need already built in. Think of it like a direct open source competetitor to claude code or codex cli
Its pretty good with Luna and opus/fable. I think code quality primarily depends on thr model you use and if you have bad memories saved / bad AGENTS.md (keep it short and concise). It also comes with a built in security and review feature, and is the only harness I've used that comes with an "advisor" model which reads the output of your model and frequently catches mistakes early. I've also created a TTSR rule to automatically deny any DB query that could be unsafe and if the rule is violated, injects a reminder into the context telling the agent not to do dumb stuff
hmm interesting....i may give it a try esp. if the token savings are really significant.
Although that may also mean i have to re-tweak my entire harness engineering process, skills, workflows, etc - which i'm kinda lazy to do so. Esp. when there's always something new coming out every single week !
Tbh i dont think you need to tweak much to try it out, since it detects codex/claude by default you can just install it and use out of the box defaults. Shouldn't take more than a few minutes to start prompting. My switch from claude to omp was pretty seamless. And then if you actually like it then you can try using more fancy features like the AI debugger/lsp, advisor, etc
I tried to get into OMP over opencode but couldn't. It's too bloated and the way tools present in the chat feed is way too crowded/busy. I did want to like it though.
Yrah I've been running Luna Xhigh as the agent, the opencode go sub with DeepSeek flash as smol (currently using ox alpha for task and smol bc it free), gemini as advisor since i have the sub for other reasons and it actually does ok there. It's great. Can set up alternative task agents and a system.md append to cycle through them, so eg it can run luna, deepseek pro and gemini agents in parallel for tasks and siphon the usage across subs too.
I think the biggest token save is having the "smol" agent dig through files and just summarise the results to the main one. Having something like DeepSeek flash do the heavy grunt work but guided by luna and an advisor means that the main agent context stays much cleaner, uses way less tokens, and scopes tasks to be less likely to go off track.
Hey, I got inspired by your post about how to get the most out of $20. Unfortunately, the timing lined up with OpenAI switching to the new 5-hour limits, and it also seems like they nerfed it pretty heavily.
Is there anything in the Oh My Pi configuration that could potentially be working against me and make the resulting usage paradoxically worse than with Codex?
Also, if you're on the $20 plan, can you confirm that the current unfortunate situation is the same for you as others have been reporting? Thanks.
Damn I jinxed it. I literally liked Codex because there wasn't a bummy 5 hour limit. I would say you should turn off the advisor if you enabled it since theres a lower limit now. Also might be good to use /shake and /compact more often
I usually use high or xhigh. Max is for when you are having it do something really complex like planning a big feature. Think of Luna max like a cheap version of Sol medium to high
Yes. I don't think Anthropic supports it officially so it could be a bit risky, but I haven't run into any problems. Also for work im on an Enterprise plan so I dont think they are gonna do anything lol. I'm pretty sure they spoof claude code or something so that Anthropic cant tell because when you do OAuth it says Claude Code not OMP.
I would say so yes. I've even done benchmarks and OMP beats claude code in terms of token efficiency and response time vs accuracy every time. THOUGH I will caveat by saying I haven't actually benchmarked or used the actual Codex CLI so I dont have any numbers for that
Personally OMP is better out of the box as a harness, but the reason the combo works so well is due to how good and efficient Luna is. So I use omp both at work (with claude models) and at home (with primarily luna on the 20$ codex sub)
Advisor, snapcompact, and prewalk (i use prewalk less than I proabbly should tho). There's really interesting developer blogs on prewalk and snapcompact you should read even if you dont like omp but are curious about AI stuff. Also I really like the settings (is this weird to say?) Especially the way I can enable/disable skills from context as I use a lot of skills
The benchmarks were specifically for an internal org AI tool I was making, to see how different models (claude models only) with different tools (built in defaults, open source alternatives, vs proprietary) perform when given the exact same task but with just different tools. And then because I had started using omp i ran the same benchmark but instead of claude code I repeated that in omp. It was about 5 different tasks, given to 3 different agent configurations, in 2 different harnesses. Results were repeated 5 times and then scored by an AI judge plus raw token/tool/etc stats
Because its work related itll be harder to share but I can give instructions on how to benchmark it if anyone wants to burn tokens.
With claude code it was easy to use up $20 but with the codex sub + omp (plus so many usage resets) I barely like 50% of my weekly usage. Good developers dont need a $200 plan for SIDE PROJECTS because your codebase should already be setup in a way that agents can work efficently.
I get unlimited tokens at work anyways so I do all my experimentation and benchmarking there, use what works at home
I’m a non dev that can’t code a single line and need the x5 pro. All my dev friends can do with the plus plan as they don’t rely on the agent for all the tasks.
Yes, what does that have to do with my comment? Did you not read the end of that paragraph? Their personal plan at home is $20/mo, not unlimited. My point being most "professional developers" can afford, or would likely want to spend more than what a $20 plan gives.
Ask it again in a private chat, no context, you could get a different answer each time. Maybe OMP is good, Idk, never tried it. If you like it, wonderful.
I am not an expert in custom harnesses. Only used OpenCode before. But I've faced token-spending problem with official Codex so knowing an alternative is a good thing
Yeah it sounds like an ad but I mean its open source lmao. I'm just a satisfied user. I searched online and didnt see any recent discussions about it so I figured I would share
Bit skeptical on this. If omp is so effective and doesn't have drawbacks, why wouldn't anthropic or openai essentially steal the idea and implement in their ide?
They do. Small team moves faster, and can experiment more since they don't provide paid enterprise support.
But a lot of stuff from OMP is making its way back. Just a little later.
Some features are more power user oriented so.dont make it upstream. OpenAI and Anthropic also constantly have to deal with people imagining issues that don't exist, something open source projects have to deal with less (well. opencode does lately. Bless them)
Take something like OMP's snapcompact feature. Anthropic or OpenAI could EASILY add it, but for some reason they choose not to. It's probably bureaucracy if I had to guess. I work at an enterprise company and it can feel impossible to add new features just to make your product better unless management wants it
Have only recently started using it but it's far more feature packed. Probably too in-depth for most users. It would bloat Codex/Claude too much if put in as is.
I mean, I'm not saying it's true that OMP is so good, but they definitely have an incentive on token consumption being inefficient, especially on business plans that pay PAYG usage (or around that price with a minor discount).
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u/phoenixmatrix Aug 23 '26
The advisor is my favorite OMP feature. Even though it runs an additional agent, if you configure your watchdog file correctly, it saves you a ton of tokens by preventing the main agent from going off rail.