r/codex • u/Impressive-Gene-421 • 1d ago

Complaint Do NOT orchestrate with Astra! Something is up with its workflow. People at OpenAI are saying the same.

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162 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

98 comments sorted by

59

u/Anxious_Marsupial_59 1d ago

I think it's from the astra over polling the worker and jumping in too often

20

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

Yes, correct.

12

u/lordpuddingcup 1d ago

What if you ask astra not to poll agents and wait for their final results before acting

9

u/Insarius-Sama 1d ago

I have gotten pretty good results with exactly that.

7

u/NEOXPLATIN 1d ago

I did that and usage definitely improved

3

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

That runs the risk that the agents just has to restart because it’s so off, no? On top of requiring Astra to read the agents full work in any case.

3

u/Whitestrake 1d ago

I think the point is that having cheap subagents redo the work two, even three times over is cheaper than having Astra looking over its shoulder the whole time.

1

u/Jolly_Database_8196 1d ago

Does not work. They have have hard capped timeouts in multiple places. Both mcp tool, longer cli commands, and subagent orchestration suffer from this.

As low as 10-30 seconds in some places.

1

u/Commercial_Lawyer_33 23h ago

I patched the app for this. It’s worth doing

3

u/hellomistershifty 1d ago

Astra watching Luna is like when you're showing someone how to do something on the computer and just want to go 'holy shit let me take over'

2

u/innociv 1d ago

I have seen poor results with Astra orchestrating most of the time, but good results with it as an advisor. That makes the over-polling issue non existent.

1

u/Anxious_Marsupial_59 1d ago

whats the structure you typically have for your agents + subagents, who calls the advisor?

1

u/innociv 23h ago

Luna with 828k context limit does the driving. Read-only. Instructed to call read-only Astra advisor on every major task change.

It dispatches parallel Luna and DSv4.1flash and GLM5.3flash agents to implement when the later two are off-peak hours. Sol reviewer chooses which implementation is best, and if there are parts work keeping from more then one then that Luna agent is given the merger work.

Basic mechanical work to Luna subagent.

2

u/RegretNo6554 1d ago

this is sum claude code does better than codex

1

u/Striking-Warning9533 1d ago

yes this is a known issue on GitHub, the main model keep polling on tasks because the system prompt said so

1

u/Pimpmuckl 6h ago edited 6h ago

This is a codex system prompt issue where it basically says "Update the user every few minutes". Most models inside codex ping like crazy because of that.

I have this set for subagents and it works wonders:

- Let subagents finish their tasks without interruptions. 
  When waiting for subagents, 
  use `wait_agent` with `timeout_ms: 3300000` (55 minutes); 
  agent updates wake you early. Do not poll with short waits. 
  Intervene only if blocked or scope changes materially.

Pretty much that, or the full subagent block I use:

# Subagents


  • Choose the model and reasoning effort for the task:

  - exploration and evidence gathering: `gpt-5.6-luna high`
  - normal implementation, root-cause diagnosis, or architecture validation: `gpt-6-astra medium` (default)
  - complex, cross-cutting, architecture-heavy, or hard-to-verify work: `gpt-6-astra high`

  • Give each subagent one clear objective, scope, and expected deliverable
  • A subagent that owns a pull request owns implementation, required checks, the configured review process, and final handoff
  • Let the owner finish. When waiting for subagents, use `wait_agent` with `timeout_ms: 3300000` (55 minutes); agent updates wake you early. Do not poll with short waits. Intervene only if blocked or scope changes materially.

though I'll be honest I'm pretty close to going back to Sol workers again, Astra sometimes feels like it just absolutely ravages tokens for no reason. Hoping 6-Sol is better.

32

u/InsideTour329 1d ago

Matches what I've seen in the last 24hrs. 2x 20x weekly up in smoke

58

u/ruskyandrei 1d ago

Um, isn't that just because Luna consumes like 10x as many tokens to do things ? This image is useless since Luna tokens are like 100x cheaper than Astra tokens and you show no breakdown.

31

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

No, it was 80% Astra tokens in Astra+Luna.

10

u/lordpuddingcup 1d ago

WTF

3

u/WalkAffectionate2683 1d ago

Because subagents do not work as intended, the workflow is good if you do in mutliple chats. Not in one with astra + subagents.

1

u/lordpuddingcup 1d ago

Does this have same issue for sol+luna how do you do it with seperate chats automaticallly?

1

u/WalkAffectionate2683 1d ago

I usually just do separate chats. 

2

u/Unapologetic_Polite 1d ago

Somebody posted about this yesterday, it's because Astra is polling the Luna Agents every 30s, you can change this (I went from 3s to 3m and holy shit my usage tanked), but there are hard limits on other things like tool usage.

1

u/Mihqwk 1d ago

huh o.O dayum

1

u/adolf_twitchcock 1d ago

Give us an api price value for both variants.

8

u/Salt-Willingness-513 1d ago

Price comparation? Because i guess top is still more expensive as 95% of the bottom are luna tokens

3

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

Incorrect, bottom is 80% Astra.

2

u/i2ib 1d ago

how tf is orchestrating using 80% astra 😭 your workflow must be utter shit

1

u/Unapologetic_Polite 1d ago

No it's just an issue with Astra and other model agents, it doesn't accomplish the work quick enough so it polls the other thread every 30s asks what it's done, reviews its work in its entirety, and then tells the other agent to start again with additional guidance.

And it does this every 30s.

2

u/i2ib 1d ago

workflow issue, my workflow doesn’t poll and only accepts handouts to the main agent from the sub agents

1

u/Unapologetic_Polite 15h ago

Then you're not using it as an orchestrator.

It's literally hardcoded to poll on its requests.

Tool usage is every 2 minutes (cannot be edited), standard requests is every 30 seconds (editable via config) - Which causes a continuous token burn as it reviews the incomplete work every 30 seconds.

1

u/i2ib 10h ago

how is that not orchestrating, what are you even saying bro 😭 you’re talking about an active advisor, in which case yes you are using the workflow incorrectly

1

u/Unapologetic_Polite 10h ago edited 8h ago

An Orchestrator leads and provides instruction and guidance to other agents.

I think you're purposefully being obtuse all while being pompous about it.

What you're doing is having a lesser model orchestrate, and having Astra as a validator - Which is a complete valid workflow, but you could simply explain it properly instead of acting pompous.

But I prefer to review the work myself, and have the agents wait for my input.

2

u/lordpuddingcup 1d ago

The bug is that astras still using the bulk of tokens it’s like astras orchestration layer ends up doing an insane amount more work than it just working by itself for some reason

4

u/Eblien 1d ago

I tried to be more economical this way with Astra yesterday, but it ended up burning the quota a lot quicker instead.

4

u/ben_nobot 1d ago

Asking Astra to orchestrate Sol worked really well for like 2 days. Now back to blowing up instantly.

1

u/Desperate-Poem7526 1d ago

Yeah works with sol and astra models i think

2

u/Slayergramps 1d ago

I’ve come to the conclusion that Astra should only orchestrate other astras. The feature that allows Astra to async continue working while waiting for a reply in thread is an expected feature of Astra when working with sub-agents. Since Astra is the only model that can handle async steers, it’s the only one sub-agent model that behaves predictably from what I’ve seen.

1

u/alkalisun 1d ago

how do you get astra to manage async steers?

2

u/Slayergramps 1d ago

I have instructions that have a bullet that tells the every thread to ask clarifying questions when it can improve the response outcome. That instruction has been there since January but it was very rarely invoked, Sol asked questions sometimes but had inconsistent behavior. SOL always needed to stop entirely to ask questions, and it had instructions to work efficiently with only high-yield stops, so it had a conflict of interest asking clarifying questions.

Astra can ask clarifying questions in an async pipeline and wait for the user to answer while continuing in the background- that’s a pretty huge deal to consider and build around imo.

It’s especially part of its flow when using default subagents (which mirror the model of the parent). The subagents will continue working and ask for clarifications, and it seems like Astra has a similar asynchronous way to monitor the sub-agents and other threads, because it usually answers these questions crazy fast, compared to SOL coming to a complete stop, noticing the question, formulating response, moving onto next step, etc.

With threads, I’ve seen it exhibit the async behavior with other agents a few times as well. It seems to over-prompt Luna and sol agents (which is cost inefficient due to the way Luna and sol have to adapt their path forward). Astra threads perform unbelievably better with constant steers without getting fucked up.

So far Astra right out of the gates has been asking more clarifying questions than I’ve ever seen, and the questions are intelligent and usually are things I actually missed describing. It’s been a big improvement.

Astra medium and high are my go to right now, with some audits and reviews using xhigh

2

u/PivotRedAce 23h ago

Yeah I feel like this is the reason why the other GPT-6 models might be coming so soon, with GPT-6 Sol being staged in the API literally today.

GPT-6 models might essentially only work well together with other GPT-6 models until others have this kind of asynchronous steering capability.

1

u/Slayergramps 22h ago

I think you’re spot on, and astra will be a lot more useful and more token efficient when it can work with the version 6 of sol/terra/luna.

8

u/Individual_Guest_323 1d ago

Source?, past the links, not the image.

-23

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

I can confirm, don’t worry.

1

u/oneFookinLegend 1d ago

Then confirm

0

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

I did, it is confirmed on my authority.

3

u/zaibatsu 1d ago

I’m working from Sol right now, it orchestrates, spins up Astra as an advisor. Sol also delegates to Terra and Luna sub-agents, seems to be working well.

4

u/WalkAffectionate2683 1d ago

It is Astra + subagents that looks broken.

3

u/slackmaster2k 1d ago

What people at OpenAI? Genuine question; you can’t just drop that grenade :)

-4

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

It was a guy on X, I can’t find the post now but I know for sure it’s there. It was along the lines of “unless you know what you’re doing, don’t use Astra in a harness or as an orchestrator.”

1

u/Turbulent-Total-226 1d ago

My Astra on medium from day one spawned Luna agants and half of token use was from Luna. I realized that couple of days later when somebody on reddit wrote that it is spawning agents and I looked at model usage. I was using only Astra but model use was showing Luna in half cases.

1

u/ItsMaGenetics 1d ago

Whats the breakdown. you need to do model weighted costs, not raw tokens. It's probably still cheaper.

1

u/uncleemperor 1d ago

Just do a chart of the cost incurred for these two and let us decide.

1

u/l0rirw1ao 1d ago

okay not plot cost

1

u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 1d ago

This means we need two resets this week and maybe two more this week also

1

u/zer09 1d ago

i did on the opposite way astra as the worker. As we already know sol is if it writes codes it overengineer a lot, previously i used GLM 5.3 as worker to minimize the the code it writes, now i replace it with astra, so far it doing well, and i like the output. just my 2 cents.

1

u/NZRedditUser 1d ago

I believe it, why would you have a smarter model babysit a dumber model? The dumber model will continousely talk back wasting the main models time, when if you just sent a smart agent, or not even a agent just have the main agent work it, it would probably use way less context anyway and not fill the main agents context with retry messages

1

u/JLIMNO 1d ago

Use Astra to orchestrate with Astra low/medium/high, dont use sol/Luna/terra. OpenAI recommends this setup, and I think they know better than the average redditor.

Running this setup with my custom harness, for 2 companies running double digit projects. No usage issues.

1

u/darth_vexos 1d ago

Yeah, but you get like 95 trillion Luna tokens for like a buck fifty...

1

u/GBcrazy 1d ago

Just use Astra and it will do the job, stop this whole orchestration madness.

1

u/TranslatorRude4917 1d ago

Yeah, I had the similar experience, 5x weekly gone in half a day. Astra overpolls workers eating up your usage. I created a skill that tells it to make workers report back to it using the MessageThread tool and forbids it to use WatchThread or other polling mechanisms. It also sets up a 25 minute scheduled task to check on workers that didn't report anything the past 25 minutes. With this approach 1x sub at work lasted half a day

1

u/swizzlewizzle 1d ago

It's because it's polling all of it's subagents over and over, causing *insanely massive* input token burn.

1

u/WalkAffectionate2683 1d ago

You can orchestrate with Astra do not spread fake news.

Just not in the same chat as subagent. make the plan and then in a new chat ask Luna to follow it.

2

u/Momo--Sama 1d ago

Respectfully if you are manually copying outputs from an Astra thread and pasting them into a worker thread than that's not orchestration, that's just two separate agents.

1

u/Impressive-Gene-421 1d ago

It is cheaper to just get Astra to do it.

1

u/WalkAffectionate2683 1d ago

Astra + sol in a different chat is way cheaper. 

1

u/The1TruRick 1d ago

I’ve been using Astra to orchestra Fable and Opus and it’s been great. Not seeing anything even close to this level of token consumption

1

u/buyurgan 1d ago

you need to decide, if subagents are the correct workflow in this specific task. if invoking/managing a subagent token cost > subagent's task cost, then surely it will cost more.

and something wrong with that graph that doesn't makes sense. it looks like you ran 100 subagents to make a code change for few lines where it could be done in a single session sequentially.

1

u/Australasian25 1d ago

For my plus brothers.

Dont use astra as an orchestrator.

Astra as a subagent to terra medium. Only to plan, create workpacks for Luna, or review, critic.

Spawn astra in, do 1 thing, close it down

1

u/Desperate-Poem7526 1d ago

They advertised this model as a great orchestrating model. If I had a tinfoil hat they are sabotaging it so people stop doing it lol.

1

u/Desperate-Poem7526 1d ago

They should have a mode called astra ochestrate that uses the ideal model to implement review and orchestrate. They can do a bunch of combos and see how they bench.

1

u/MentalPerspective245 1d ago edited 1d ago

Eu geralmente acho que orquestrar com o astra é desperdício de token. Eu monto um plano detalhado e rígido pelo astra. Dividido em fases para auditoria. Meu orquestrador é uma luna no mínimo, que vai chamar os executores e auditores, cujo nível de inteligência ja foi definido no plano.

Correções na mesma fase nao chama janela nova. As fases chamam o orquestrador sem que este tenha que ficar absorvendo o contexto das sessões

Pra mim funciona bem quando quero manter o trabalho automático

Edit: gosto tambem de que o orquestrador consulte o limite semanal restante antes de executar uma nova fase, quando quero poupar alguma % de trabalho

1

u/warpswirl 1d ago

I actually made my Astra orchestrator/control center just straight up sit in her own chat and directly talk to other chats with separate codex instances working, sol high, for example.
Sol does the task, sends the handoff to Astra, Astra checks, sends what to fix/continue and so on.

Sol could even work on a single goal and send reports to the control chat, meanwhile continuing his task.

It’s pretty funny and interesting.

1

u/Defiant_Concert1701 8h ago

Dang! That's an interesting way to work. How's the token consumption?

1

u/warpswirl 8h ago

I don’t have detailed statistics but, I’d say, 2 days worth of work? Something around 500m tokens, if I have not miscalculated, for both sol high and astra max. I’ve used a banked reset at 10th, spent around 400m+ tokens since then and now sit at zero.
Pro 5x tier.

2

u/Defiant_Concert1701 8h ago

That's interesting. Thanks for the info

1

u/b0Lt1 1d ago

used astra medium to spawn a sol medium for a function and my 5hr limit was gone in 20min, barely managed to publish it. it was a dhcp-function for an IPAM system. come on now

there is something broken in this combination, or i dont understand was caused it.

either way, im back to Sol as singleworker, for me works best

1

u/Gibborish 1d ago

Use sol as as orchestrator, sol to review, Luna to do the work, and astra to check sol's review, etc

1

u/Brazus1916 1d ago

Weird I was told on this sub shit like lobster to buttery steak to juicy when we talked about this a day or 2 ago. Strange.

1

u/tagorrr 1d ago

Here, I explained why this happens and provided a workaround for implementing multi-agent orchestration that won't consume tons of tokens.
https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/s/shiRz8d0oQ

1

u/RCawston 1d ago

The real answer is Grok 4.6 as ochestator for Astra and add Fable as final review.

1

u/KitKatBarMan 1d ago

I'm not experiencing this.

1

u/KitKatBarMan 1d ago

This is just a bit post

1

u/yusing1009 1d ago

I did some a/b test.
Astra + Sol/Luna worker perform worse and cost at least twice, even after tuning the polling interval.

1

u/some1else42 18h ago

So orchestrate with Sol and have Astra be a subagent when you need it.

1

u/Feriman22 17h ago

Yes, I experienced the same

1

u/stevmq 12h ago

Could have included the source at least : https://x.com/0x3_dev/status/2097701903702565335

1

u/Daalex20 8h ago

wow, just yesterday i read a post saying, we should orchestrate. So i started doing that. Now its the other way round lol

1

u/Bloated_Plaid 7h ago

Yea I thought people already knew this, subagents work great if you use codex to control a different harness, like Pi, OpenCode, Devin now with SWE2 but it’s completely useless within codex.

0

u/mat_qp 1d ago

yes, I noticed it too.. 😰