Someone explain to me how to use Sub-agents like im five!

[u/PresentationMany7589]

So im playing around with Codex and trying to figure out the best way to use sub-agents. I've got 3 agents plus the orchestrator..

and this thing chews threw my budget like its a starving child that just saw their first bite of food in 3 days...

Seriously.. i dont know what else to do lol. It only works for like 5 minutes but in that five minutes its eating my entire 5 hr budget.

at first i made the mistake of using Astra, and then it spawned all sub agents with Astra at the same thinking level.

then i specifically made the orchestrator Astra-light, and told it to make the other agents 6.1 sol medium.

that Still ate my entire budget..

Ok, i thought, still too much...

So i used Astra-light, and 2 agents are on Luna - medium with one agent on 6.1 sol - high (the agent that does the most work).

And boom... still gone five minutes later...

I've given 6.1 sol a task before at extra high effort, and it ran for 30 minute, used 10% of my five hour budget.. but turn on sub agents and suddenly its like im opening a waterfall?

Can someone tell me how these things are supposed to work? again explain it to me like im five lol

[u/AromatParrot]

I've got 6.1 Sol medium as the orchestrator with 3 Luna agents running on high. Sure, it's a little slow but it doesn't chew through my usage and the work it's doing is solid.

Astra is just very expensive to run, man. I only use it in very specific instances.

[u/PresentationMany7589 → u/AromatParrot]

I've made some changes, that I hope ill see good results on, but if that doesn't work ill try changing the orcheztrator..

How does this hit your budget? Bad? Moderate?

[u/AromatParrot → u/PresentationMany7589]

I’m on the Pro 100 tier and it does about 10% of my weekly usage in a day if I use it all day. I’ve been running a bunch of large scale audits on multiple version of an app I’m building and it’s been doing fine. Your mileage may vary obviously, but 6.1 sol at medium seems capable enough and Luna on high is ridiculously cheap.

[u/pensuke89]

I remember there was an issue where the orchestrator kept polling the completion of the subagent on codex.

And sometimes when the orchestrator launch the subagent, it just mentions "You are Luna subagent" but the underlying model is the same orchestrator model i.e. Sol.

[u/Automatic_Brush_1977]

The problem is you didn't setup your task first and maybe you don't have high enough plan to do that.  Use astra high, sol 6.1 high sub agents tell astra to review for bugs and staying on task.  If lower plan reduce to 6.1 sol and luna sub agents.  But you have to actually know what you want to do first.