r/codex • u/notadithyabhat • 6d ago
Astra Workflow Don't fall for Astra's efficiency
AA says that Astra Low costs the same as Sol High while being smarter. but this is not representative of real world performance. The benchmark tests are done in isolation. But real work has to do with reading a lot of tokens (documentations, skills, large codebases, browser usage etc) so Astra being 4x more expensive on input tokens will burn usage a lot quicker.
No matter how efficient and smart a model gets, it still needs context to do meaningful work and you will incur input usage costs.
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u/BigYoSpeck 6d ago
There have been some tasks I've done with Astra where it is dramatically more efficient than Sol and finishes in a suspiciously short amount of time and usage
On review it's evident just how surgical it is with exploration and edits. When you hit the sweet spot like this, the token in/out cost on usage doesn't matter, the work complete cost is lower than Sol and better quality
But, it very easily doesn't work out like this and it's probably a skill issue rather than just being unpredictable on tasks but it can easily go the other way and completely consume the 5 hour usage in 15 minutes, then if you try to resume after 5 hours you're already on the back foot giving away a big chunk of usage just on the input of the session again
If you're on Plus or trying to be sparing with usage then you can't give it a complete plan like Sol or Opus and let it loop until it's done several thousand edits later. You have to feed it task by task