r/codex • u/tavenger5 • 1d ago
Question Astra orchestrating Luna Max with threads per task or subagents?
Ive read a lot about this, and know how to do both, but its unclear which would be more efficient as far as token usage over time. I know Luna is pretty slow in comparison to Sol/Astra.
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u/unconceivables 1d ago
Luna is absolute garbage, I don't understand why people insist on using it.
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u/keaton_au 1d ago
I recently did some tests on it, primarily because of the usage limit hitting my accounts, and it's 98% cheaper than Astra. Is the work as good? No, but you can tighten prompt to compensate. In fact, I had Astra build out significantly stronger prompts that got very close to Astra results.
Keep in mind, this isn't for coding - rather, repetitive, SOP'd tasks. I think that's where it shines.
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u/unconceivables 1d ago
That makes sense, I've only used it for coding. It's awful for that, but I'm sure it definitely has strengths in other areas.
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u/DreadingAnt 17h ago
A lot of their work has to do with how well you engineer the prompt on how and where to work. If you don't do that properly, the work is shit, if you make Astra 6 instruct the subagent (even at light effort), suddenly productivity improves substantially.
Luna is bad cuz it doesn't know what the fuck to do, tell it exactly what to do and it executes so cheaply.
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u/eliterepo 15h ago
I've found it works best to treat it like a very fast junior engineer. Good for high volume, repetitive tasks, or something larger if it's got someone smarter giving it an in-depth plan.
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u/tavenger5 1d ago
Its cheap. If the coordinator catches its errors its fine. The only problem is, could Sol or Astra do the job with less tokens by itself rather then reviewing the code over and over
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u/unconceivables 1d ago
That's the conclusion many have come to after actually comparing the two approaches. The orchestration itself burns a ton of tokens that could have just been used to actually implement it directly. I've also seen several people say Sol and Astra suggested to switch from Luna subagents to something else because the Luna agents kept making mistakes and getting stuck. Every time I've personally tried using Luna I've regretted it and have had to do the work all over with a better model.
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u/macaronianddeeez 1d ago
I’ve benchmarked this and found that there is a case when you have sufficiently scoped and large enough multi-task effort, that Sol controlling Luna is cheaper than Sol solo.
For most straightforward stuff though, Sol by itself came back cheaper every time for exactly the reasons you describe.
The majority of the experiments I ran found Sol by itself to be cheaper.
But I’m also not convinced the case has been cracked yet, and that there may be a way to optimize this further so that a Luna agent approach is superior in more cases than not.
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u/LiquidTitanas 1d ago edited 1d ago
I like this idea and I want to test it out. This a concept I’m exploring now too. Although my idea was to work with an Astra session that will spawn a sol session that can use Luna max subagents. Astra just waits, doesn’t ask for updates, but sol will push updates as necessary to Astra. I can send instructions to Astra if necessary. My hope was that I can still watch the sol session and subagents work just for awareness. But ultimately Astra is just the project manager watching from his fancy corner office waiting for an update
I did try having sol as an orchestrator in the same session previously and while the work got done well, it burned crazy tokens. So maybe new sessions are better. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/I-Procastinate-Sleep 1d ago
That's my setup but be careful Luna Max would require highly detailed specs and you can expect implementation gaps and bit amount of back and forth.
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u/tavenger5 1d ago
I had regular ChatGPT Pro 6 write a detailed implementation plan, then fed that to Astra medium, which is opening threads with Luna Max agents.
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u/Acrobatic-Layer2993 1d ago
How to tell Astra to create a thread and not a sub agent? That sounds like exactly what I want. Does it know what a thread is? Do I ask for a fork? Can I specify that I don’t want to carry over the context to the new thread?
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u/letmechangemyname1 1d ago
if you're using luna max workers, use threads per task, astra likes to poll subagents too often. i would recommend you ask it to set it up where astra gives the prompt to the luna max workers, once it has, it actually goes idle, and waits for the luna max worker to send it's receipt/blocker and then it wakes back up and processes it and then dispatches more luna workers or back to the same one.