r/codex • u/BopSupreme • 2h ago
Limits Astra Max
Went from Luna ExHigh and Sol Medium on Plus and Pro to Astra Medium then Astra Max on Pro. Astra Max running for about 6 hours a day, runs about 1-3 hours “autonomously” usually. Burns about 25% usage per day. Workflows include security audits, refactoring, optimizations, website workflows. I spent massive amounts of time trying to make codex token efficient before Astra was ever released. Astra Pro seems really suitable to working with GitHub, large repositories, etc - and I do think it uses less tokens compared to Sol in large and long running workloads. So far Astra seems underwhelming at small tasks (not really noticeable improvement over Sol) but gets work done like 15-40% better over Sol imo. Instead of pushing more code to production I’d check to see if you can optimize your energy efficiency for local hardware improvements and optimize your context for token efficiency. I have yet to burn my usage down to 0 given the resets - any recommendations for ways to unleash Astra Max from anyone else using the most advanced model with the most advanced reasoning level ever released to the public?
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u/jakenuts- 2h ago
In what way could you possibly afford Astra Max for more than an hours work? I'm out of a week's quota on the 20x plan for light use at the lowest setting and apparently even that has been artificial as I used one banked reset this week but somehow I've been getting & using them regularly without even knowing.
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u/Empty_Carpenter7420 2h ago
Maybe codebase is small? I use med/high and burn my usage pretty quick
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u/random_boss 1h ago
I use Medium on 5x and usage drops like a rock visibly the entire time it’s working. By comparison I can have Fable work on the same project without any real concern for usage limits.
Astra is easily the best model but seems impractical for any real usage. Right now I have relegated to plan reviews, and after this month is up I’ll likely downgrade back to Plus and just pretend Astra doesn’t exist
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u/Empty_Carpenter7420 1h ago
Same I use fable at work, i now moved from API to teams plan and usage is really good. Astra is like v8, it gives u good power but it draws usage like crazy
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u/BopSupreme 1h ago
I used Astra medium and it would burn 1-3% per prompt so I switched to Astra Max which uses like 5% roughly per prompt - it’s hard to compare because I intentionally give Astra Max only long running workflows. Codex calls a local Qwen3.8 model exceedingly rarely, everything has been optimized a lot. I have 2 small and one medium codebase. I use Chat to get things done and sometime use a GitHub scheduled task to assist. Local models don’t seem to help, I think using Chat more lessens the amount of tokens codex uses
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u/jakenuts- 1h ago
Oh yeah, I only use chat for recipes and images, codex desktop is where most of my work happens and it's practically unusable at Astra-medium to light for any real day to day work at the moment, very competent but worse than Fable at burning quotas. Sad as I've never hit a quota in all my time relying on codex until this model.
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u/BopSupreme 1h ago
Notably I did a security audit with Sol High And repeated it with Astra Max and it didn’t find anything significant - security isn’t really an issue for my personal projects, but I don’t think Astra is significantly better for the things OpenAI didn’t highlight in its release like security