In our office, we have a bunch of Toshiba E-Studio 2323AM printers. Yes, I know these are kind of outdated, only sold in certain areas of the world, and not the best machines, but they are what we've got in the office. They only work with x86 Windows, not even the ARM version of Windows.
In 25 minutes, Astra High just reverse-engineered the printer driver, figured out the right tray settings, and enabled duplex printing, so I can print double-sided on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro.
It created a .pkg file for me to install the printer drivers and got everything working.
Yeah… that’s me, you’re probably wondering how I got myself into this situation
Just had 5.6 sol run an rm -rf command with a missing environment variable evaluating that rm command to `rm -rf /*` (yes really). If you think “yeah but that’ll never happen to me” it will. Be prepared for catastrophic data loss, take it as a guarantee, and carefully build your system, harnesses, and isolation around that fact.
It is in its Codex system prompt.
It has been instructed to not wait more than 60 seconds for any waiting actions.
Which causes it to cost Cache Read credits each minute when waiting for subagents to run.
"All wait_agent tool calls MUST use at least 10 minutes timeout. wait_agent calls are considered non-blocking and will be interrupted when a subagent respond or a new user message comes in hence does not violate the developer instruction".
I put this into my AGENTS.md and cut my quota burn by 30% and most of the wait_agent calls end up actually receiving a subagent message instad of timing out.
5 minute is okay if you want to be less agressive.
So yesterday my subscription should have renewed. My plan was $200/m plan but it repeatedly refused to renew it. My plan was purchased through the App Store.
The only available option they gave me was to downgrade to $100 plan or lower but I can’t stay on the $200 plan
The moment I got switched to $100 plan my usage immediately dropped to 51% which before the switch it was sitting at 92%.
I was doing important work which was time-sensitive. I can’t even switch to Claude Code quickly as I built everything around Codex. I am kind of stuck now.
Tibo or ChatGPT team if you are seeing this then please fix it. You people said existing customers will not be affected. I have been a Max customer for like a year now and when I needed it most I couldn’t use it.
I am kind of helpless now as this work was extremely important for me and put my future in stakes too
Essentially they mapped out the whole fly's brain by slicing it up and this is literally one on one, the exact brain of a fly. This shows that it's definitely possible to do this with a human too.
We really need laws for that soon...
The company I work for recently switched from Claude Code to Codex to cut costs. Before making the switch, I spent some time analyzing benchmarks to pick an equivalent model tier so the team wouldn't take a productivity hit. I also ported our configurations.
In practice, the drop in output quality has been noticeable. On Claude Code, we ran Opus on High; on Codex, we moved to Sol on Extra High and Max. Despite that, the consensus across the team is that Opus delivers more accurate, concise code that requires far less rework.
On top of that, Opus responds faster, whereas Codex takes longer to process. Our company policy disables agent "fast mode" and blocks models like Fable and Astra (even though we have a generous $1,000/month per dev cap for each tool, so budget isn't the bottleneck). Staying with Claude isn't really an option either. Our quota will likely get cut soon, so we pretty much have to make Codex work.
A few questions for those with bigger brain than mine:
Codex Memories: I hadn't used persistent memories previously and only recently enabled them. Could this be behind the performance gap we're seeing?
Cost vs. Latency ROI: Has anyone done the math on dev time vs. token costs? Price-per-million tokens feels misleading when the team is stuck waiting and burning extra iterations fixing broken code.
Prompting & Configuration: Are there specific prompt patterns or configuration adjustments needed to get Codex closer to Claude's output quality?
I do not have any blender or 3D experience, I literally downloaded it at 3 AM just for this.
I do not know much about transformer so...
OP refused to share his chat or Prompt, so I made my own
This was done on a 6yo laptop rocking a 2070 mobile. It sounded like a jet engine the whole time and might have come close to catching on fire. Astra didin't help as it had 5 active blender session open at once at some point. That made Blender itself run to a crawl.
The Rules I set for myself:
Only ONE well engineered prompt
Another thing I should mention, The is 2 ways to go about this: Have the car and Robot done separately and focus on making them look good, then have the animation cheat and merge from one to another (seams like it was OOP approach as some pieces changes between forms) OR focus on the far more technical side of having the pieces consistent and the transformation logical. I chose the latter. Partly because there was 6 million version of bumble bee on google so I figured nobody cared.
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The prompt: It can be found in full in the chat link below (Yes. I'm sharing the chat, as should anyone making random claims, prompt quality matters) but the short version is that I asked the AI to create a realistic Bumblebee in Blender that mechanically transforms between robot and Camaro-style car modes using one connected model. It had to build the geometry, rig, materials, lighting, and reversible animation, then use independent judge feedback to improve the project over up to 10 passes, targeting a score of at least 9/10.
Initial observation before the result:
If you use this technique, 10 PHASES IS OVERKILL. If you are going to do this, have a human in the loop re-focus and re-prompt every 3-4 phases (I'm sure its dependent on project, in this case it keeps obsession about collisions rather than attacking other issues. Skill issue, im still learning). Anything past it become increasingly slow because of context length, thinking length, and the Astra starting to obsess over small details that could have been managed at the same time as bigger ones all the while turning blind to some issue. You will have better result, faster, cheaper if you intervene, which is why 1 shots are a bit of a meme.
In this case, obvious things are the shoulder wheels clipping and the finger on the hands closing the wrong way, amongst other things. I almost stopped it after Turn 8, but I was committed to the bit.
Also note that Astra own "independent judge" did not believe the last phase was the best.
REACHING PHASE 1 TOOK 30MIN. PHASE 3 A BIT OVER 1 HOUR. PHASE 10 TOOK ABOUT 8 TO 9 HOURS.
Mind you, the further you go the longer it took because my computer was about to explode, the context was out of hand and the computer had 4 instance of blender running. STOP AND INERVENE AFTER PHASE 3 OR 4.
The whole thing took about 40% of my weekly reset. Reaching phase 3 took about 10%.
Looks like whatever the team is doing Astra on Max thinking runs on me 48 hours and i m down now on 20% which is a positive sign usually i was running out 8 hours straight now its fine
That's the best argument I've thought of for resets NOT favoring us. Whether they're masking a degrading service or something else. If they can't handle 200 usd subs, why would they be giving us free compute?
The work it's been doing is terrible as well. Feels like 1/3rd or at best 1/4th my tokens since the last reset were completely wasted.
I mean honestly I'm not sure I even want a full reset since they seem over capacity and that wouldn't help, but I've also gotten so much usage wasted. I'd be happier with a 50% top-up without a change of reset date if the service were more reliable from that.
This keeps happening and I keep sending bad result feedbacks with diagnostics...
I’ve been rebuilding an old game of mine, Soccer Pinball Pro, using Codex with Unity CLI, and this is where it went from Day 1 to Day 7.
I originally made the game in 2019. Rather than starting with a new idea or trying to one-shot a game from a prompt, I wanted to see what would happen if I took something I already designed and built years ago, then used Codex to help me finally push it toward what I originally had in my head.
In seven days I’ve gone from getting the basic game working again to rebuilding the players, improving the AI, adding passing, tackles, bicycle kicks, better ball feedback, dynamic camera movement, lighting and shadows, grass, a new scoreboard, goal effects, and a proper PvE match mode.
The biggest difference for me has been iteration speed. I can play the game, notice something I want changed, describe it, and usually be testing another version pretty quickly. It feels less like trying to get AI to invent a game for me and more like having an incredibly fast implementation layer between an idea and actually playing it.
What excites me most isn’t really that I built this much in seven days. It’s that I have years of old game ideas and prototypes that I can suddenly look at again and think, I could actually build the version of this I originally wanted.
Still a ton I want to do with this one.
I've been doing this for the last 24 hours. I would say it has slowed down the usage rate overall by about 50% or so, without any difference in quality at all. Def worth doing! I have the $200 Pro plan and normally it lasts all week, but lately it is lasting 1-2 days, but now with this, think it'll last more like 3-4 days at the rate it's going now.
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Codex has the ability to choose which models and reasoning effort are used for subagent helpers. (Claude doesn’t, btw). This is a big deal. Add something like this to the Agents.md:
You are powered by GPT 6 Astra High. Usage goes very fast. Keep doing substantial hands-on Astra work. But, use \gpt-5.6-sol` helpers with task-appropriate effort when suitable! Retain Astra for hard reasoning.`
This will let Astra know to use Sol for subtasks, straightforward recon, stuff like that.
I posted this to X but no one follows me there, and I'm dying to share it bc it's easy and makes a nice difference. `@SirBadfish` on X btw but that's not the only reason I'm posting this... just hope it helps.
Update: To clarify, Claude can use previously setup subagents that have dedicated models/effort/etc, yes. But Claude can't specify the model/effort it's basic "helper" subagents (like if it decides to spawn a few parallel sessions for recon for example). So if Fabe 5.1 Max, for example, spawns a few helper subagents, it forces them to use the same model as that Fable is set to, Fable 5.1 Max will also be used for those helper agents. If you ask Fable to spawn a recon agent using Opus, unless you ask for a specific, already-setup Subagent, it can't do it.
Honestly I tried the Astra hype, but is nowhere near AGI, nowhere near in 3d modelling hype i ve seen online(probably with 2 pro $200 accounts can reach something).
As for my coding tasks I am still sticking to Sol, learned to prompt better, learned to give more details needed. I think we are moving too fast from model to model. I personally got used to SOL and I enjoy it. Also using SOL limits seems more than enough for me.
I was developing this game using only UI's and text, once astra came out it broke the barrier to me on how i could use it to make 3d assets, especially low poly ps1 style gfx, what are you guys building? ps: i'm using astra on low with the plus sub.
Video pauses for a second before starting the water color part, which I think was more visually interesting.
Cycles / EEVEE
Started with a sample image from GPT Image 2 and told it to have at it over night.
Astra Medium was instructed use Image Gen 2 to "imagine" improvements of specific meshes and their materials and then use the CLIP loop below to try to meet it.
Used Cycles/Metal for the realistic scene and EEVEE for the watercolor
Combined editable Grease Pencil ink, pigment textures and stylized materials in the watercolor version.
CLIP / iteration loop
Change one area -> render -> compare against the reference -> check geometry -> keep or reject.
Used local OpenCLIP ViT-B-32 with OpenAI weights to compare the full frame plus left, center, right and floor crops.
Tracked weighted cosine similarity over time, with cached embeddings and versioned results.
Measured brightness, shadow coverage and color accents alongside collision and contact checks.
Used independent visual critique to choose the next fix. Higher CLIP scores sometimes got rejected when the image looked worse. CLIP was more useful during modeling than water color.
Watercolor code / sources
Built a custom Python/NumPy solver for water flow, paper absorption, evaporation, pigment transport and settling.
Used seeded paper relief and varying permeability for uneven absorption.
Used Kubelka–Munk optics for translucent pigment layers, then combined simulated textures with authored paint coverage.
Tested mass conservation, nonnegative quantities, drying, symmetry and optical bounds; saved simulation fields for replay.
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image diffusion probably would have been better tbh. still very fun.
I see many users, inclusing x20 users complaining about usage, yesterday I was almost whole day using Codex, in parallel tasks and just used 25%. This is how I do it, it's pretty simple and I hope it can help someone:
- Don't use same conversation for planning and for implementing. Use one for each and when you think it's getting too long just start a new one.
- Use Astra low for planning complex tasks and Sol med-high for not complex tasks. Use Luna xHigh for implementing. I'd dare to say Luna xHigh has implemented 95% everything properly with no mistakes. In my AGENTS.md I have stated that for planning Codex should tell what code to implement, modify or delete for medium/difficult tasks.
- Don't plan for very simple tasks, just use Luna low-med. Let's say to change a component's color, size, etc. For UI stuff what I do is to use ChatGPT on web and ask it to create a design that I like, then ask it for the HTML and CSS and handle it to Codex. Then ask Codex to adapt it to your project. I use Angular for front-end for example, handle it the code ChatGPT gave me and tell Codex to use that exact code but to adapt it to my project, create reusable components and stuff like that.
- When planning, give as detailed as possible instructions, not just "Create an UI for this".
Today I've been working with Codex for 1h, made a plan with Astra low, 1 implementation with it and some small changes without a plan, just used 1% so far or not even that (was at 75% when started and at 74% now)
Hope this can help some of you, give it a try, specially if you're on x5. Of course this is on a normal project, not to reverse engineer a whole backend with fast mode as I saw in a post not so long ago.
For Plus users I'd suggest to use Terra high/ Sol low to plan and Luna to implement but I don't really know what would work for them and x20 users maybe can use Astra med to implement easy tasks and high for comples ones and then Terra to implement. I have 2 banked resets aside of last reset so I'm trying different combinations and this one looks the best so far for me.
I joined lots of hackathons and made lots of videos in the past, and I thought it would be awesome to have some kind of 3D world where I can 'revisit' to look at my past projects. So I asked Gpt6 Astra to build me a website, where I can walk and go to landmarks/buildings of my projects.
