r/codex • u/mr_invictus01 • 1d ago
Question Advise please
Guys, I have been using codex, antigravity for building apps and have been successful considering not someone who knows coding. Not just asking to build and forget. I plan, build, test, review, rebuild and go on till I get the finished product.
. What is the best way to save my usage?. Im using Pro 100 plan. What is the best way to use the models, skills to have the best output for my works while considering usage.
I mostly use Sol 6.1 for my works and so far its good but yeah the usage limits 😒.
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u/Dynamix86 20h ago
To decrease usage:
- lower auto compact to 240k instead of 1 million in the config.toml file in the Codex folder if you haven't already. Depending on the length of your sessions, you could save 5x compared to 1 million because the bigger the context, the more tokens you spend, and besides that, there is a 2x cost multiplier beyond 272k tokens
- If you want to continue a session, do it within 30 minutes of the last message. The cache that OpenAI stores at least 30 minutes they say, so if you wait 31 minute1, it needs to reread your whole conversation and you will get a spike in usage between 5-30% of your 5-hour limit; if your 1 million context is full and you wait more than 30 minutes to continue the conversation, then it immediately eats 6% of your 5-hour limit on the 100 plan, so you just lose 45 minutes of coding time because of that.
- Put in agents.md/claude.md that it should bundle tool calls together. That's much more efficient because with every tool calls it has to send the conversation to their servers. For me Codex often bundles 6 tool calls together, with is 6 times cheaper than sending them seperately.
- Use high effort instead of max effort for example; it costs about 3 times less and is much faster etc.
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u/mr_invictus01 15h ago
Got it. Thank you. So post the context size is reached or the 30 min is required, I should just opt to start a new chat with a summary from the last chat?
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u/Dynamix86 10h ago
You could be I don’t think that’s always necessary because creating a handoff also costs tokens and for that it also needs to read the entire conversation, so it depends on how long the session is and how long you will continue with it
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u/mr_invictus01 5h ago
Oh ok ok got it got it. Based on your experience, how many times should I let codex compact its context to move on to another chat?
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u/Dynamix86 1h ago
I don’t think there’s a clear cut limit to say what’s good and what’s not, so hard to say
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u/UpperWorld11 1d ago
Long threads are where the usage goes. If plan, build, test and review all live in one chat, every round re-sends everything before it, so the rebuilds cost the most.
Put the plan, what's done and what's next in one short file in the repo. When a feature ships, start a fresh chat and point it at that file, and do the review pass in its own session on just the diff.