alt Hacker News> 50% cheaper cache than GPT-6 Sol will get you far more mileage on Codex.
Cache doesn't help you much when you are compacting every 5 minutes...
I was shocked at how quickly I ran out my $100/mo subscription with a single agent (sol medium).
Replies
If you're compacting every 5 minutes, you have a workflow problem - period.
No LLM will be cost effective if it's compacting this often. You have to find a way around it.
Your tool calls (MCPs?) are very likely too wasteful. Apply some filtering logic on the offending tool’s output. Either a wrapper CLI, or just tell codex how to filter.
you can actually leverage 400k and 1M contexts in codex with very little code changes to the harness. note that excess context past the.. 250k or 400k mark (i don't remember) is charged at 2x the price.
You have a lot of control over compaction, both directly by changing compaction settings, and indirectly by how you structure your codebase/docs so agents use less tokens.
you can config codex to compact at a higher context limit
As a reference i burn 1% percent for every 40 minutes of sol on average
Try Gemini. It’s so cheap I often use my personal AI Pro account for corporate work, and most of the time it doesn’t matter.
If you run out of sol medium with $100 you're doing something wrong. Astra destroys your usage, I get 1 day of usage with Astra, but 6 sol is almost unlimited and I only use xhigh.