alt Hacker NewsI think ultra mode needs to be more clearly documented (or perhaps cautioned against!). Most devs - myself included - who saw “ultra” mode figured that it’s just a magic bullet that makes the model work harder and achieve better results. But, for many tasks, ultra mode is possibly worse and certainly more expensive.
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> that it’s just a magic bullet that makes the model work harder and achieve better results
"Ultra" is a harness feature, and has nothing to do with the model itself. If OpenAI wanted to, they could offer "Ultra" with any of the GPT models, although 5.6 supposedly been trained with this specific harness feature in mind. "max" is basically the top "work harder and achieve better results" parameter for the reasoning effort for the current models.
I had good success with it initially, until I discovered that OpenAI encrypts the prompts that the main model sends to the sub-agents (even in Codex, in local files you only see cipher text), then I completely dropped any experimentation of it as without introspection, it becomes basically useless for any real usage.
> But, for many tasks, ultra mode is possibly worse and certainly more expensive.
Went through something similar. Fable would just spends minutes thinking, processing, confabulating etc.
I dropped down to Haiku and got an answer in >30 seconds.
Yeah I think having a detailed mental model of what it’s actually doing helps.
At least for Fable/Opus (didn’t confirm for Sol yet) Ultra means “write an ephemeral programmatic harness encoding this workflow”. There is actually a TS harness that gets run for the workflow.
If you have a task where the agent/sub-agent pattern works, Ultra just adds indirection.
I think it is possible to get an intuition for an individual model but really you need to eval to be sure. My heuristic though is if you need to treat each work item differently depending on the results, probably agent/subagent. If you want to do the same steps across some queue / tree / DAG of work items, ultra is a better bet. (Or actually write a durable scaffold if you are going to repeatedly run it over > thousands of items.)