[sidgarimella]

I've found Sol's propensity for delegating to subagents can make it... disastrously expensive, especially with each subagent having some implicit floor on further reasoning/context gathering before action.

The base model is certainly cheaper and more token efficient etc, but on large tasks cost in some way is now n^2

[mafesio]

I have the codex x20 plan also. Set it to 5.6 sol ultra, gave it one task, in less than 10 mins I got the 10% warning. I did have it do a few things earlier, just some anaylsis and then create a pdf from it. I thought maybe that took a little longer than I though.

Used a reset, it went for about 11 minutes and then, just out of usage popped up, no warning, there were still 4 agents running, the nice thing is it did let them finish, each one went for about 10 minutes.

I also have a claude max plan, I have been using Fable 5 on ultra, I never hit the session limit, and get 3 or 4 full day's looping on ultra.

I don't know how it handles the subagents, but claude does it much more efficiently, Codex does seem much faster, so maybe it's just a relativity thing.

[winwang]

How bad is it for you? Are you on ultra or xhigh/max? I typically ask it (5.5, now 5.6-sol) to use subagents for specific things anyway. On the Pro 20x plan, I'm seeing like ~1% usage per 20-30 min per session (on max effort), which is in line with 5.5. Currently trying out ultra on a personal project, feels like ~3x more expensive per unit time. (No idea on quality yet, for obvious reasons.)

[sidgarimella]

Max via Cursor, should've mentioned, very possible I'm seeing more Cursor than OAI. All the subagents it picked were also Sol Max... I've seen 7-10 in one turn. Regardless the top reasoning tiers being conflated with subagent count feels double edged

[alasano]

My global CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md etc have strict rules to never use subagents without approval or when specifically requested except for whitelisted scenarios.

I think that's the way to go most of the time