Can expect 2.5x more usage in Codex subscription.
Sol is already brutal (even after their recent fixes, it's just a token-hungry model: I go through a full 20x account per day, on Sol Med/High standard speed, with ~2 threads). I hope the efficiency gains are true, since their token efficiency claims for Sol were bullshit.
Do you use the official harness? OpenAI's models are generally best in class for token efficiency. It seems to me like they push for that much more than their competitors.
I think some combination of:
1) Using 1 thread for everything
2) Reviving old threads which are no longer in cache
3) Really broad prompts on badly vibecoded codebases, so model spends huge amount of time tracking down whatever you're trying to do.
4) Non-coding workflow which is more output than input heavy
5) (Less likely IMO) Intelligent use of many passive CI/cron-like scans. E.g. regular security, quality etc scans. Automated issue resolution/PR
Just a guess. I think 3 is likely the primary reason.
You can literally go all day every day with multiple threads with Sol on the Codex 100/month plan IME
I generally agree with those reasons, although using a single thread may be less of an issue than it seems because of context compacting which should happen automatically when you're near the limit.
Token efficiency is near meaningless when the workload is input-heavy. It can't always just choose to read less, depending on the task.
I can have cheaper agents do the reading but it's not appropriate for all use cases because they'll misjudge and choose the wrong things to emphasize, summarize, extract for the bigger model.
I use new threads if relevant old one is uncached. (Often using a skill or doc for handoff instead of requiring full context gathering again.)
I get involved in architecture and specific implementation direction. The codebase is 8 years old and mostly handwritten.
Mostly coding. Some QA.
No cron/CI agents.
Besides the usual tricks to optimize token efficiency, token use can be highly workload-dependent.
I'm sure I could be more token efficient, but this was/is also a learning process for me since I never did such an extremely large project before that would take multiple man years before AI.
I only save the last 30% of usage on a single account for most of my other work, and that is almost always enough.