logoalt Hacker News

mohsen1yesterday at 5:27 PM9 repliesview on HN

> Additionally, we’re introducing a new `ultra` mode that goes beyond the capabilities of a single agent by leveraging subagents to accelerate complex work.

I'm curious about how does this work? Do the subagents also get to use the same tools? Will the client be flooded with tool calls? Why extra pricing for a new "model" when the same thing can happen in the client with more controls?

And if it's an army of subagents, why do they compare it to Fable and Mythos? Those models with similar harness would probably bench better I'm guessing


Replies

gck1yesterday at 6:02 PM

If it's anything like ClaudeCode's ultracode, it's nothing new or revolutionary.

It's essentially a bunch of subagents being called by a deterministic script written by the main model thread, each eating tokens for lunch and output of which is synthesized by an orchestrator agent.

show 3 replies
derwikiyesterday at 5:53 PM

Don’t all the major harnesses (pi, Claude code, codex) utilize sub agents? Def if you direct it to, but I’ve seen at least pi spin them up without explicit instruction.

show 2 replies
roliszyesterday at 8:38 PM

If it's anything like Claude Ultracode, it burns 3 million tokens in half an hour with a single prompt.

koolalatoday at 5:16 AM

Sounds like an Agent using an Agent like Mr. Meeseeks.

jamiltonyesterday at 6:09 PM

Yeah, I'm interested too. My guess for the reason, if not purely to eke out more performance, is so they can cleanly gather real-world data on this kind of usage.

alansaberyesterday at 5:54 PM

I'm shocked they didn't use subagents already. Maybe they're just talking about their web deployment being unified with codex?

show 2 replies
simianwordsyesterday at 5:50 PM

Claude also has ultra code mode which is exactly the same thing. This seems to be different from pro however.

jiggawattstoday at 9:02 AM

> Will the client be flooded with tool calls?

I was just saying to colleagues that I haven't felt the need to go past an 8 core machine until this month, when I started running parallel GPT 5.5 agents on a decent sized codebase (over 4 MB of code). There were times I could barely move my mouse cursor!