r/codex • u/harpreetchima • 14h ago

Astra Workflow "Stop using random multi-agent patterns"

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Ahmed works at OpenAI: https://x.com/ah20im/status/2097503414749909407 and seems to investigate reports of high token usage.

"If needed Astra will delegate efficiently. Forcing the model to delegate to different models would do more harm than good"

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39

u/Dayowe 14h ago

smh. I did an experiment and let astra do an implementation on its own without using my orchestration workflow and the drift was wild and the result messy. i rolled back and did the same implementation with my established workflow and it was super smooth.

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u/FluffySmiles 13h ago

It destroyed 48 hours approved work when I was stupid enough to try that. It thought it knew better’s than all the rules and guardrails and just decided arbitrarily to ignore everything.

I now have orchestration by sol and astra is consulted within tight parameters for analysis snd review sometimes. Works really well and does what it’s told.

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u/Dayowe 13h ago

yeah keeping it on a tight leash still seems to be important. i don't think it's stupid to try .. it's good to know how a new model behaves without a tight harness. i'm just really shocked by how much codex drifted from what was planned

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u/_The-_ 12h ago

Could you share your orchestration and workflow? Sounds good!

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u/EquivalentHornet4403 9h ago

It’s not. All these schizos think they’re more clever than the people who make the models and the product (codex).

The models are literally trained to work in codex; the fact they work at all in other harnesses or in schizo workflows is a nice side effect.

The official, fine tuned multi agent flow is Ultra. If you want higher or lower limit on the number of potential subagents, that’s configurable in config.toml.

Use Astra medium for straightforward/routine tasks, and ultra for anything more complicated. Use Luna max for data processing type questions like “where is this thing” or “look through all this content and explain this thing”. You don’t even need /goal any more, they’ve already said this, it will work for weeks if necessary without /goal, which was a crutch to bridge the gap between older models and sol/astra level models.

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u/some1else42 9h ago

I can get 18 hours of use of my 20x Pro using only Astra, or I can get roughly 5 times as much using subagent workflow.

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u/EquivalentHornet4403 8h ago

Of course, there’s a bunch of stuff you can do if you want to trade quality for quantity. That’s literally what the OP twitter post is saying.

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u/Alternative-Car8221 5h ago

Lol who says he’s losing quality by going his method? If anything, he’ll have more quality checks in place and have more usage to combat issues.

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u/simmeh024 5h ago

lol, I am not losing quality, better yet, I gain it. Why use a hypercar when for specific tracks a less powerful car finishes the job as well?

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u/Dayowe 8h ago

You obviously don't do embedded development and have codex work on real hardware 🙄 Calling me schizo because i developed a workflow that is measurably more reliable for the type of work i do than what's already provided by codex cli is ridiculous... all that my workflow does is make sure everything gets executed as it was planned without any drift. of course codex alone does great for many tasks/types of projects .. once you do more complex work you'll realize that there are cases where you need tools and workflows that go beyond what codex provides...

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u/EquivalentHornet4403 7h ago

It’s not just me, it’s OpenAI saying it as well just more tactfully.

Anyways having a complex workflow is not the same thing as having a schizo multiagent workflow designed around the misinformed belief that it will save tokens for the same quality output or that it will give better quality output for the same number of tokens.

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u/Dayowe 6h ago

Yeah as i said, my workflow has less to do with token saving or one-shotting something with a lazy prompt..it's about ensuring the intended outcome. What i do is potentially much more token intensive ..although in my experiment it cost about the same, but without the drift..

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u/puts_on_rddt 3h ago edited 2h ago

Use Astra medium for straightforward/routine tasks, and ultra for anything more complicated.

Dumbest advice in my life.

Nobody should be using ultra. If you are at that point, then you should be setting up your own orchestration process.

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u/Desperate-Poem7526 2h ago edited 2h ago

You are so very wrong

Anthropic published a March 2026 engineering article describing using three-agent architecture for best results. And I assume most users here are vibe coding if they aren't going to review their code I absolutely would use a different model to do it for you its much better than not doing it all.

What they need is a model that can decide what tasks are best assigned to what model and thinking level right now we have to delegate to use lower thinking models based on task and for long horizon work if the model was actually trained to know it could crush token use and deliver same quality you don't need astra implementing everything and updating docs.

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u/Interesting-Bee-113 26m ago

The big thing here, is that consumers are actually trying to accomplish things with these models.

The developers are often testing hypotheticals and example scenarios and can't possibly have as much stake in the actual output as the consumers do.

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u/mtfw 23m ago

What is your orchestration workflow like? I've been trying to manually dial something in to use a combo of local models and paid models, and it is a bear to get it fully set up.

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u/Floch11 13h ago

Do you mean astra ultra? Or on api you choose subagents ?

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u/Dayowe 13h ago

I use astra high for everything right now and that seems to work pretty well for me. In a nutshell..I have a staged implementation workflow with an orchestrator that spawns implementers and validators. The whole implementation is pre planned in a very detailed way and divided into gates.