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replyThese folks are probably using crazy plugins or crazy sub agent spams.
They probably just run everything on max + fast mode which is ridiculous.
replyThe guy said medium/high regular speed so that's why I'm very puzzled! Ultra + Fast will absolutely slurp up your whole usage quickly but I've never found it gives substantially better results so I stick to extra high.
replyI gave more details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49559593
replyBesides the usual tricks to optimize token efficiency, token use can be highly workload-dependent.
Sub-agents. I have 7 20x accounts and I burn them within 1-2 days if I go fully parallel. In some scenarios I use 50 sub-agents for a session which is literally hours of usage for a single 20x account. I'm at the point where I need to parallelize over multiple machines because I just don't have enough CPU and RAM.
replyThe only subagents I use are Luna.
replyWhat are you doing with them you need so many? It sounds like a Gas Town situation, that you invented an exponential token burning machine.
replyDecompilation of a game and another larger decompile project. I'm working on it solo. I use 50 sub-agent, one per target function or translation unit. Often there is some progress in a unit but it's not done. So it requires a lot of cycles per function. Notably a single ~80kb function took about a week of constant sol-ultra attention before reaching exactness. The game I'm targeting has ~5000 total functions. The other decompile project has ~10k+ functions.
replyI'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.
Fascinating! I think that’s the main difference is my usage is probably tool-bound, meaning it writes some code but then there’s a long period of verification where it compiles things and then waits for the compilation and CI to complete before it can continue. That probably doesn’t consume as many tokens as constantly churning on a problem despite the same wall time.
replyYes, this is why I mentioned having so many parallel agents and being compute bound. I run on my own laptop and 2 high-end desktop machines all with 64gb RAM. And it still occasionally happens that one OOM kills codex. They also mostly run unattended until I need to switch their accounts because a usage limit has been hit. Each instance usually can keep going when I sleep or do other things.
replyI only save the last 30% of usage on a single account for most of my other work, and that is almost always enough.
Sounds like you might benefit from running a custom harness then, no? I can't imagine for a task such as that- that codex is the best option.
replywhat are you doing with that many agents/tokens? very curious
replySee my other comment on your sibling that asked the same.
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