You are probably guiding them step by step and reading the results. Maybe you also sit and wait for the results.

Agents can iterate on a problem for hours if they can see their results and be given a higher level goal to evaluate their progress toward.

When you have an agent working for minutes or hours, never wait on it. Use that time to spin up another agent.

You can also spin up several agents in parallel to attempt the same item of work and compare their results to choose which to work off for next steps, instead of rolling the dice on a single option at a time and gambling that it's better to refine that first attempt instead of retrying from the start several more times.

And if you are doing manual QA manually, you're missing out on having e.g. Codex's "Computer Use" or "Browser Use" automate your manual verification steps and collecting a report for you to review more quickly. Codex can control multiple virtual cursors simultaneously in the background without stealing focus, to parallelize this.

If you want to use up more tokens to get more done (though more outside of your control and ability to review of course), that's how.