The headline graph is kind of bizarre.
For some reason they're comparing their harness running on Astra xhigh to Codex with Astra max?
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Also worth noting that OpenAI just added support for async tool calling to their harness, which isn't 1:1 with this approach, but is slowly ramping up in being able to provide something similar.
A big part of why Codex uses so many tokens is that it basically hot loops on polling tasks it starts for... absolutely no good reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wdlp7q/weve_discove...
I fixed it on my fork of Codex too, also back in Jan/Feb – I keep this patch rebased, for anyone who wants it: https://github.com/tekacs/codex/commit/9ffcf8db9078eae43d411...
It results in token savings similar in scale to those displayed here by Unreal.
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My harness has used a slightly fancier version of the approach that Unreal is using since ~Feb, and... it definitely works excellently, but it's also assuredly smoother with Astra and other recent models that are more aware of async tool calling.
the headline chart was lazy on our part, thanks for the flag and I’ll update it.
each individual benchmark that is combined into agentic coding index was compared on xhigh between ua / codex / pi, and headline improvement was calculated on xhigh, but then agentic coding index pareto chart by default includex codex max, hense the confusion.
To reduce the codex polling I slapped this into my ~/.codex/config.toml:
Seems to do the job and reduce usage; I just ran Astra for ~5 hours (using a goal) and it used the last 30% of my usage. And now they released GPT-6 Sol and Luna (which is basically 5.6 Sol and Luna, but a bit better and also 50% cheaper) ;_;