Love the price reductions across major players

Because Qwen4 has been announced!

And GLM 5.3 works great

There's no way this wasn't meant to coincide with Anthropic's release today.

Cutting prices by 50% as compared to 5.6 prices is exciting. GPT-6 Luna at $0.10/Mio input tokens and $0.50/Mio output is positively insane.

EDIT: this doesn't say anything about availability on either Azure or AWS. I'm assuming it will show up later, but it would be interesting if it didn't.

Does API price cut translate into higher allowance on the subscription? Do we know?

I’d rather keep 5.6 Sol, and get that even more optimized. I’m not sure I’ll like 6 Sol if it’s anything like Astra.

Opus 5.5 seems better? Can someone attach both scores

Not the direct competitor to Opus 5.5, cuz 6 Sol is 50% cheaper.

Same price on Cache Reads 0.2/M So won't be 50 percent cheaper, more like 25% cheaper assuming half cost is cache read.

cost is dominated by non cached reads

Pricing is insane, can have Luna going after a goal for 10 days and not run into maxing out the limits.

Why would you do this though, surely these long running /goal tasks just like letting a wild animal out into your code base.

Does anyone care about code quality anymore?

1. you can have luna clean up after itself and improve code 2. you might be doing something like video-editing, cad modeling, artistic direction, pcb routing, etc. that need to run a long time to "converge"

I prefer to do these things myself and grow my competency.

This will make me more valuable in the future when everyone has lost the ability to do anything on their own.

Luna is fine. It's not Claude Sonnet 3.5.

I don't see how anyone can be using Claude with prices like this, it's pretty incredible what the OpenAI team is doing, w.r.t model quality and pricing.

  Prices per 1M tokens     Claude Opus 5.5    Claude Opus 5
   Cache reads              $0.20              $0.50
   Input tokens             $4                 $5
   Output tokens            $20                $25
   Cache writes             $5                 $6.25

Model

Input

Output

Price reduction

GPT‑6 Sol vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol

$4 → $2

$20 → $10

50% cheaper

GPT‑6 Luna vs. GPT‑5.6 Luna

$0.20 → $0.10

$1.20 → $0.50

50% cheaper

The last time I gave GPT a shot, it ate all my tokens and got nothing meaningful done.

GPT would charge more if they could. Both companies need way way more revenue. GPT simply made a calculation that they can earn more money by charging less than their competitors.

Any business would charge more if they could. Jevon's paradox would mean that they can make more money by charging less because demand is going to keep growing.

FWIW, what you're describing is a simple demand curve, not Jevons paradox.

The "paradox" is when an increase in efficiency which would decrease the use of a resource all else equal, instead indirectly causes more use.

Of course they'd charge more if they could... Of course they're pricing to outcompete their competitor...

For API usage, sure. But plenty of people have subscriptions where these differences effectively don’t matter.

It should matter; if their costs go down you'll get more usage.

I could already run Sol High on 3 concurrent side projects 24/7 and not run out of quota.

This is great, but practically, I'm not going to start working on more side projects.

Perhaps in another 6-12 months I'll be fine to drop down to $20/m instead of $200.

How much does it cost you per month to have that much sol high usage and what do you use, api? Through what? Thank you

> GPT‑6 Sol vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol

> $4 → $2

> $20 → $10

Do you mean 100% more expensive? GPT 6 is 100% more expensive than 5.6 per your post.

It's before and after following the arrow. 6 is the cheaper one.

Wtf is GPT-6 Sol, I though GPT-6 is Astra?

Number is generation Name is the size (Luna smallest to Astra largest)

Then what is Astra high-extra high-Ultra? That’s effort within each tier?

Disagree. I would never use OpenAI cause they're probably just going to steal whatever I'm working on.

and anthropic won't? or any other inference provider? Running your own inference either locally or remotely are probably the only ways to make sure that doesn't happen.

Well we know for a fact that OpenAI steals Millennium Problem work from researchers. Have we seen anything similar from Anthropic?

And why is that bad? As your brain gets older, it will not remain so clever, so you'll be grateful for an AI that thinks like you do when it comes to your line of work, failing which the quality of your output could recede like your hairline.

Are you really comparing LLMs to brains?

See I will never use anthropic because they run inference on spacex. Wat den een sien Uhl, is den annern sien Nachtigall.

What’s your problem with spacex? Do you have Elon derangement syndrome?

These are the pre rug pull prices. They'll increase prices 10x and nerf the models after they IPO.

Okay? I didn’t sign a 10 year contract. We’re month to month and I use my own harness.

If they’re subsidizing my usage, that’s great.

You're building your livelihood/workflows on a set of inputs that you have no idea what they actually cost or how reliable they'll be when the VC cash stops flowing. If you're OK with that, do your thing but it seems a little foolish to me.

If the market crashes they will be much cheaper to run actually, no? Hardware would flood the market.

I mainly use Codex/Sol to review my plans drafted by Fable. But beyond that, Astra blows through usage limits too fast to be a daily driver and writes weird code despite what my "house style" is, and Codex is behind Claude Code in terms of critical features like seeing what's going on in subagents.

The parent + subagent workflow has become critical for keeping the reasoning agent (parent) context-lean while also letting me chat to the main agent while work is getting done.

My main process is to use Fable to reason and then spawn Opus subagents, and I get amazing results, and I'm always looking into what the subagents are doing.

Astra is:

- Unbearably slow

- A token eating machine like no other

- Constantly compacting

- A model (like other GPT ones) that hides thinking traces and thinking summaries, which infuriates me

I've been in the Claude camp for a while, but the way it writes has left me with a a brick for a brain and wanted to see if Astra was as good as they say. Well, I can't know, because in the time it takes for it to actually build anything useful, I've moved to other ideas.

Unbearably, annoyingly slow. I keep thinking I must be doing something wrong.

It also feels slow for me and compacts often.

However, it is not a 'token eating machine'. In fact it uses a third of the output tokens of Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, or Opus 5.

17k for Astra xhigh vs 61-66k.

50% cheaper

Cache read/write decrease by 50% or similar? That's where most (95%+) of the cost is for agentic coding workloads.

No terra it seems? Luna 5.6 is great for token churning so it will be exciting to try the new one.

Perhaps people realized that Luna Max is ~ Terra?

It looks like the optimal pattern is to have Astra as the orchestrator and Sol as the implementer. Same as with Fable and Opus.

I've found Sol to be an excellent orchestrator, with Astra the planner and Sol again the implementer.

[flagged]

And comments complaining about other comments too

Welcome to the new internet. It was fun whilst it lasted. Next evolution will likely be closed, invite only forums.

Fundamentally I feel like coders just doesn't even need to be that smart anymore given AI assistance. This place ten years ago used to be filled with some of the most interesting comments/takes around for that reason.

I remember how a few months ago Dang was criticizing people for making comments like this. Guess he just realized how stupid that was and stopped bothering eventually.

It's asking a lot to trust they can or will maintain this new pricing. In any case it's exciting to think this might lead to further price cuts in the highly competent and competitive Chinese clones. I'm still using ChatGPT for interactive queries, but at this point pretty much only because of its familiar UI

Curious why you think it's unsustainable?

Well, they do rug pull constantly. This week and last leading up to this the cost to use Codex was overwhelmingly perceived as terrible. People running out of usage all over the place. Reddit full of people crying. I noticed it myself.

Then they do a new model launch, issue quota resets all around, and it's a party for 2-3 weeks before things return to normal.

Oh, I'm happy I'm not the only one. Astra was feasting on tokens!

Because at some point keeping it up involves filing an S-1 that doesn't look like a garbage fire

Didn't SpaceX already set a precedence for garbage fire S-1s? I don't think OpenAI has to worry about that?

SpaceX is a different beast with extremely high friction to enter its market, a massive technology lead, and well developed preferential high level relationships with just about every country worth worrying about.

OpenAI/Anthropic meanwhile feel a bit like they're hoping to sell iPhones in a market about to be flooded by $20 flip phones, with almost no channel of their own to do it. And for whatever mad reason OpenAI are now signalling they will attempt to compete on price with flip phones despite their cost of labour, energy, and just about everything else being far higher

so opus 5.5 is smarter and cheaper than fable, and sol 6 is a little dumber and WAY cheaper than astra? is that right?

Luna really is "intelligence to cheap to meter" by now

I've been working with agents all year, but 5.6 Sol was some sort of sweet spot for me. Something about how it communicated verbally and its engineering instincts just clicked for me, and I was able to somehow predict it and jam with it. Like a colleague you click with. It's the first model I've gotten attached to. I'm concerned that whatever model supercedes it, while technically better, just won't feel quite as natural to work with. And this makes me feel very professionally vulnerable to the labs. I miss the days when my crucial tooling came from companies as reliable and predictable as, say, Jetbrains.

Same. In fact I found 6 Astra to be a downgrade in situations where I didn't need the extra intelligence.

Yeah.

Astra was/is superior for planning type tasks. It was capable of doing seemingly magic things with rather vague/lazy instructions ("I need to be able to test this on Windows, maybe a qemu VM or something? Shrug." ... 1 hour later "yeah i built you a whole qemu + eval windows image + harness of powershell scripts + shell scripts to retrieve & verify harness.").

And for UI work -- which is not something I do a lot of but do here and there -- it was clearly superior to 5.6 Sol.

But it also feels sloppier? Somehow. And too expensive to use.

We'll see how Sol 6 is.

I felt this way with Sol in the 5.6 series and was one of the seemingly few people on this earth who liked Terra for that reason. I would often have a very specific code-manipulation ask, e.g. "add a parameter to this method, ensure all callers pass it in, if there is not a logical way to derive the parameter to be passed in a particular instance, flag this in your final response", and Sol would go on some rabbit hole side quest to refactor my codebase to determine some way to derive it rather than flagging it as I had asked.

Terra had the "workhorse" quality where it could do these changes in bulk and follow directions without being too 'smart' (but sloppy) as you described. Luna was a bit too dumb and would make sloppy mistakes; I see that more as a "run these tests and format the results" sort of model. Maybe 6 Luna will be better.

I also just reread your comment and realized the naming convention is still extremely confusing with respect to ordering of [Family]x[Model]x[Number].

I also get good mileage out of Terra when I need a diligent workhorse. That's a good way to describe it. We should start using character archetypes when we describe models, it'll do more good than the dubious numbers and cherry-picked quotes. Maybe RPG character-type cliches? Myers Briggs?

I fear the opposite will happen. Guy driving like a maniac almost side-swipes you in traffic? "Look at this 1-bit quantized Qwen 2.5 7B over here".

Lol, you’re still anthropomorphizing models? That’s so 2025. We’re modelomorphizing people nowadays.

More seriously this has been my fear all along.

When people spend their days interacting with machines that pretend to be human, they may then start treating real humans like machines.

Completely agree. I've been using 5.6 still even with Astra available to me for most tasks. It's funny how much of this is just "vibes" because I cannot quantify what it is. Astra is definitely better when I have an ambitious feature, but in like 9/10 tasks I prefer working with 5.6 Sol. A few weeks ago when the limits were seemingly higher, having 5.6 on fast mode was a good time.

Astra is 100% conpletionist no chill alien.

It wants things beyond what the mortals (us) know to reach for. It's not good at explaining itself, it doesn't show it's thinking. It's often not wrong. But the no compromises attitude can be unbearable to deal with. Especially given how little it cares about telling us.

If you’re using the API, both OpenAI and Anthropic models will happily update you on what it’s doing in significant and frequent detail with system prompting. You’re not getting raw/hidden thinking, but what you’re describing is more behavioural quirks of the harness and its system prompts.

The other explanation is just as part of ‘token efficiency’

Same. The way I would describe it is that I can mostly leave 5.6 Sol overnight and trust that it makes good progress, maybe stumbling a bit and needing some correction for the remaining 20%.

If I leave Astra overnight, I'll wake up with three new different projects, each of them 20% done and having nothing to do with my original goal.

The A in Astra stands for ADHD. It's featuring a neurodiversal net.

OpenAI, Antrophic and others are operating with 80% margins. They can lower the prices for a long while.

Source?

I dont understand why there is not a gpt-6 terra?

It wasn't really used enough and it sat in an awkward middle space between luna and sol where either luna high/xhigh or sol med were better cost/perf wise

It probably didn't see that much use, as it struggled to find a niche. If you wanted intelligence tasks, Sol was cheap enough and much smarter. If you wanted performance and cost-effectiveness, Luna was significantly better value while being only a little less intelligent.

Terra ended up just being an awkward middle ground that was not particularly suited for any workload.

I'm scared now, my employer only allows Luna and Terra on 5.6. I really hope they will allow Sol then on GPT 6.

Funny thing is they very recently also set a real limit per-user/month, so why even limit the models because theyre "too expensive".

I've been raving about Luna 5.6 as it's dirt cheap, and "intelligent enough". Double quoted.

Now GPT 6 Luna is even cheaper, and more intelligent, there is no going back... to SOL 5.6 for intelligent layer.

Per the benchmarks in the post, Luna 6 is at best a couple points superior to Luna 5.6 and (unless I’m reading it wrong) xhigh has actually degraded in quality?

I was hoping for a serious Luna upgrade. It was already cheap enough. This feels more like a price reduction than an upgrade.

That said, if the new Luna is able to handle ultra mode and subagents v2 in codex cli, then at least that’s a win.

This is the most blatantly astroturfed thread I have ever seen on Hacker News.

My previous comment--which suggested astroturfing--was the highest upvoted comment here until it got flagged. Which implies to me that atleast the other remaining humans on this forum see it as well.

26 minutes, 89 comments, upvoted instantly to the top, posted within one hour of the Opus 5.5 announcement. You tell me.

My previous comment--which suggested astroturfing--was the highest upvoted comment here until it got flagged

fyi, i flagged it because it is boring reading and against the rules.

if you suspect astroturfing, flag the comments and contact the mods.

(complaining that your complaint got flagged is also tiresome. contact the mods. "@dang" doesnt work, use the email.)

Do you think the "you can't mention astroturfing" rule is really serving HN these days? Do you think this thread hasn't been manipulated?

I respect you for replying here though, and yes I get that HN forum standards would suggest flagging my previous comment. But it is just sad to see a place used to be so vibrant get manipulated because of how much weight it holds for us in the industry.

And yea sure, I could go and flag all the bots and message Dang. But probably time to stop shouting into the void. :)

I agree with the rule and also found your comment boring.

Also, I don’t see that much astroturfing here? (And I tend to see it a lot on HN.)

Yes, this thread is not being manipulated. People a) being excited about something and b) it being in favor of a certain company is not sufficient evidence of astroturfing.

I've seen your articles in the past and I thought they were great. So I respect your thinking, and have no intention of being combative.

But do you really think people were so excited about cheaper versions of Astra that they were just waiting around to comment the instant this was posted? More than two comments per minute? All the initial comments were really similar too: brief one liners celebrating the cheap prices.

I think AI right now is a sort of Rorschach test. What it is clearly revealing to me is that I don't trust organizations with enormous financial incentives to not manipulate public opinion. So I see bots everywhere. :)

Yes. See my comment on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oxaernim5mj2mmy3ytrvb42n/po...

what the fuck

Do you think the "you can't mention astroturfing" rule is really serving HN these days?

yes, i think so.

because, unfortunately, complaining about bots (or astroturfing, or whatever) doesn't stop them. so we end up with threads that have both the potential bot/astroturfing/whatever activity and complaints, which further drowns out any interesting comments.

Do you think all the comments in here are positive about the model? Because they aren't. In no way does it seem astroturfed. And yeah, pretty boring to read that kind of comment every time.

You have to accept that people are different than you.

I see long massive pro apple threads. I don't get it at all. As in; literally don't understand what Apple is good for. But I have friends, family irl who love apple so I know the sentiment exists. I therefore accept that many HN users are similar.

Many people really truly are happy to see another model drop and are excited about progress etc etc. Surely you've met such ppl in real life. Well, they're here too (I'm one of them fwiw)

There's no evidence of astroturfing. The comments you’re referring to are from accounts with established history and in different locations, without any evidence of being linked to OpenAI. They just seem excited about the models and the pricing.

On the other hand, you have previously written: I'll gladly admit I think what these companies are doing is unethical, and I'm sure that biases my thinking toward skepticism. [1]

You have now posted accusations/assumptions of astroturfing and manipulation at least 15 times, without ever providing any evidence. This is in breach of the guidelines, because comments like this poison discussions far more than the comments they're complaining about.

We – of course – want all comments and posts on HN to be authentic. HN is only a place where anyone wants to participate because since the beginning, we've had software mechanisms and moderation practices that detect and weed out inauthentic commenting and voting. We're identifying and dealing with it every day, continually improving the software to detect and remove it. Most of that happens quietly and efficiently in the background without anyone having to see it. When users see evidence of manipulation and report it to us via email, we happily and thoroughly investigate it.

Most of the time, what we find is simply that people are authentically excited and passionate about the topic, which is what is happening here. I understand it can be hard to accept that if you're skeptical about the topic.

It's fine to be skeptical about the topic and you're welcome to express your skeptical views on the topic. People do that every day on HN, about AI-related topics and countless others. Healthy debate is what we're here for.

But you can't keep poisoning HN, by (1) continually posting these unfounded claims, then (2) when users and moderators simply uphold the guidelines, staging a protest by demanding your account be deleted. This is not what people do when they care about a forum's health.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48220908

Hopefully it is clear from my other comments that I do try to provide value too.

You have now posted accusations/assumptions of astroturfing and manipulation at least 15 times, without ever providing any evidence.

I tried to point out the upvote speed and age-to-comment ratio for this thread look anomalous to me, and that it being posted within the Opus 5.5 release hour was further reason for skepticism. Circumstantial, sure, but I see very little ways to gather hard evidence of astroturfing without being a mod.

when users and moderators simply uphold the guidelines, staging a protest by demanding your account be deleted.

You're right this was a little dramatic. I think it is just annoying though when two times that I have posted about astroturfing, it has been the most upvoted comment only to get flagged. I guess this is a self-fulfilling prophecy though, as you are right that other human commenters are abound and tend to flag people complaining about astroturfing.

Anyway thanks for the reply. If your read of my account is that I'm more-often-than-not a bad actor, then I will stop commenting here. Seems like it is for the best. :)

Clearly this isn't the first time. Remember criticizing model releases will get you flagged here.

This is why HN has been on the down hill in quality and those that care to highlight that are being punished, while the astro-turfing, gaslighting and Show HN self-promotion slop continues.

At this point, the deciding factors for me between Claude Code 20x and Codex Pro 20x are:

1/ Usage limits: downstream of input/output cost, but resets and obscure windows and odd 20x plan / 5x plan != 4x usage math throw a wrench into it. Winner right now is Codex by a mile, especially when you factor in the fact that ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan. Always a bummer when asking if I should see a doctor about a rash means I can't code as much. It's also is a godsend if you use an MCP like oracle to automate the process of calling the Pro model on particularly tough problems, giving better planning results or deeper code analysis without burning usage.

2/ Context window in the harness. Claude Code wins on this. There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing (ETA: noname120 pointed out this is no longer the case and it can be enabled again [1]). 252k is just not enough. Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that even a model as powerful as Astra sometimes loses the plot on long-running tasks.

3/ Ability to use the plan outside of the official harness. Codex wins. Anthropic does shit like bills requests as extra usage if it sees a hermes.md in a commit.

I've subscription hopped a bunch, and at times I've had both, but I keep coming back to Codex because it wins on 2/3.

ETA: apparently I haven't been Keeping Up With the Altmans and new 20x signups have been disabled for a few weeks. I am grandfathered in, which makes the comparison above pretty much moot.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806060

I dunno about Codex-the-application itself, but you can definitely use e.g. Pi with the larger context windows with a Codex login. It puts a pretty large multiplier on credit usage, however.

It's also is a godsend if you use an MCP like oracle to automate the process of calling the Pro model on particularly tough problems

As far as I know Codex (at least the GUI) can automatically call the ChatGPT Chat models (including Astra 6 Pro), you just need to @ a ChatGPT Chat conversation from within Codex and tell it when to use it.

There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing

Not true, it works again[1]. I confirm that it works both on 5.6 Sol and Astra 6, possibly other models too.

[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2089082893804896524

In my personal experience I currently get a lot, lot more usage on the 5x Claude plan than the 5x Codex plan.

Having limitless webUI ChatGPT usage is much better user experience, though. I'll give them that.

(edit: Sol-6 is half the price, so maybe the usage limits are going to be way better.)

I've been using Claude Pro and recently gave Codex a try again. Both on the $20 plans. I get so much more usage with Claude. It's night and day for me. Codex runs out constantly, whereas Claude I hit limits very rarely.

Assuming you are doing coding, I'm curious how would you characterize tne majority of your work (language, domain, frontend/backend, etc)?

Winner right now is Codex by a mile

Opposite in my experience. I need to limit codex to 500k on medium/low, still run out in 2-3 days with 1 CLI window. CC gives me 4-5 medium/high days with 2-3 CLI windows, and Opus is still great for other regular dumb engineering/refactoring.

On the other hand my head starts to hurt if I read Opus for too long, hopefully they fixed it with 5.5.

What are you talking about? ChatGPT unmetered? No way! That was 2 months ago perhaps and it’s possible your account still hasn’t gotten the new limits. I noticed around 1 month ago I was still going full throttle on my codex subscription and my limits were barely budging, and then all of sudden people around me started to complain about limits. I thought they’re crazy, but then my account go the hammer, and that was it. If I have the same pattern of usage like I did before, basically having an agent working continuously on a coding take, my weekly limit goes in 2 days.

Interesting, rolling out new limits would explain a lot. Where did you hear this? I wonder if they detect users with multiple accounts and do that first.

On usage in ChatGPT settings, I see: Plan limits Shared across Codex, Work, Workspace Agents, and ChatGPT for Excel. Chat conversations are not included.

Is this not the default anymore? I am on the (now closed) 20x plan.

That’s the default. I didn’t express myself clearly but I thinking your situation is not the common case anymore, or perhaps you are not using it hard enough. Codex limits deplete very fast these days, it’s not “unlimited”.

I am saying that because ChatGPT usage is unlimited, I don't have to eat into my Codex limits when I use ChatGPT. Codex certainly has limits. Last time I had a Claude sub (hedging here since much of the info in my comment was outdated), my usage limits on claude.ai threads was shared with Claude Code.

Finally got the nuance. Indeed the chat part of the subscription is unlimited as far as I know. Now that part of your comment makes sense!

Codex/ChatGPT Pro 20x isn't really a thing now, they have disabled it a week or two ago.

It’s back available since 4 days ago.

Usage limits [...] Winner right now is Codex by a mile

This hasn't been the case since around July. If you measure usage in raw api costs, Anthropic is actually giving more on $200 than OpenAI now. This includes resets. Usage allocation difference would be humiliating for codex subs were it not for resets. But fixing usage limits with resets is ugly, and they're not good for your mental well-being.

Context window in the harness

Codex now allows 1M for subs with config params. But generally speaking, you shouldn't really be using 1M context. If you accidentally send a request with say, ~700k context already accumulated in a session which is outside cache TTL, you're paying full cost of these 700k tokens.

I've subscription hopped a bunch

OpenAI actually has a new strategy to prevent subscription hopping after their 2-3 month-long marketing push to get claude-folks to switch over:

you can't buy a $200 sub anymore. So if you cancel, you won't be able to get back in. Hostage situation, essentially.

EDIT: re: usage limits, oh-my-pi maintainer has been tracking this - https://nitter.xitter.cc/_can1357/status/2090075496948060372

you can't buy a $200 sub anymore

Are you sure?

Yes.

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2098113585683808624

That is an old tweet. They since reenabled it. I know because I was on the $200/month plan and couldn't resub once it expired. However, a couple days ago it finally let me resub again.

Now, if they disabled it yet again, that's another story. But that tweet is not evidence of that.

I have been attempting to get on the $200 sub for a while. It was not available for me a few days ago, and checking again now, it is still not available.

That's too bad. I wonder why I was able to get it after days of not being able to. They must've just temporarily enabled it again. Probably worth checking a few times a day to see if it reappears.

Though with the price of GPT-6 Luna, the temptation to switch to pay-per-token grows.

I’ve been a Claude user, switched to Codex expecting usage limits to be more loose but I can’t even get through a basic sysadmin task on the $20 plan using Sol medium before I hit the 5hr one.

I think I’m gonna move back to a Claude plan. I could barely hit the $200 limit if I went non-stop on programming tasks.

I do the bulk of work on Sol Medium/Low and don't have that experience on the $20 plan. If you said Astra I'd agree it's easy to burn through the 5 hours even on the lower reasoning levels.

Do you have /fast enabled by any chance?

I don’t think so, I’ve seen it suggest I try it. I’ll double check when I get home though.

I was considering the $100 plan, but I hit the 5hr limit in an hour. So even with the $100 plan I figured I cant go non-stop on a single agent running Sol Medium

I think OpenAI essentially executed a bait-and-switch here, and they've lost a lot of goodwill with me, like Anthropic did, before them.

When they started the aggressive campaign, entire X (including myself, sadly) was full of posts about how "unlimited" codex usage is even on a $20 plan. Sam Altman was posting something in line of "we love our users, unlike Anthropic". Got my network to get codex subs because of the value compared to claude.

Then they gradually reduced the limits to the point where even $200 plan only lasts you just 1-2 days and $20 is basically unusable, then the hostage thing.

similar here: I tried Codex $20/mo on a trial and I ran out of 5hr usage mid way through a medium complexity task on a medium size model twice and gave up there. I don’t recall the equiv Claude plan being anything like that. Anecdata, but not great for OAI if they actually want to retain people on a trial.

You don't get Fable on Claude 20 USD plan. You get Sol on equivalent Codex plan.

Astra is barely usable even on the $100 plan. And that is if it doesn't just burn through 80% of your weekly quota in a couple of hours by continually expanding the scope of the task you gave it - while not noticing the failing tests that are right in front of it.

Opus is at least actually usable even on the small plan. The main downside is its insane writing style, but 5.5 seems to address that somewhat. Otherwise, you can just use your $20 OpenAI plan to have Luna de-slop Opus' prose, which seems to work fine.

But you don't get Fable on Claude 20 USD plan, then why compare it Sol on Codex 20 USD?

Given that Anthropic models are very verbose and OpenAI models can be very concise, wouldn't a count of expected task completions be a better measurement than raw API costs?

Do you have a source on the first note? I switched away from Claude around July because of how bad the usage limits were, and Codex gave me easily double the amount of usage per task completed. Would be interested to see if that's no longer the case.

I'm not sure the tokens can be compared like that between OpenAI/Anthropic.

When i swapped between a 200k Fable context into an Astra model (i was out of fable) the token usage in that context dropped to 150k or something.

Either there was a bug somewhere, or the same text got cut up very differently between providers.

Maybe it's due to 20x / 5x != 4 but I have the $200/mo Claude and $100/mo Codex and I get _way_ less usage on Codex, well under 1/4th the usage. In 1-2 days of semi-heavy _single_ agent usage with Sol High I can burn through my whole week of Codex. Again, this is not running multiple agents, just 1 at a time.

Compare that to Claude and I can run multiple agents on Opus almost indefinitely. YMMV of course but I was shocked at how quickly I burned through Codex usage.

On the context window, I feel so cramped on Codex, compacting happening every time I turn around is annoying. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed the Claude context window size.

Isn’t that to be expected when comparing one 20x plan to another 5x plan?

I am curious how the 5x plans differ between both providers.

Claude Code 20x and Codex Pro 20x

That isn't a valid comparison, since Codex 20x is closed. So we should be comparing Claud 20x to Codex 5x + credits.

Also in Codex, even though you can increase the context window to 1m so its on par with Claude, exceeding the default is billed at 2x.

You’re sharing outdated info

Care to be specific? 20x is closed. And the 2x pricing is literally on the pricing sheet for gpt-6 astra, sol and luna.

Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

While you're understandably not including the values of the $20 standard plans on both, I find the generosity of then token limits on ChatGPT plus vs Claude Pro (it's a huge difference) to be good representation of their respective attitudes towards the average user. You literally cannot use Claude pro to build real software, unless you're extremely frugal with your prompts and don't try anything even a little ambitious.

Also, Anthropic has zero models comparable to Luna.

Reasons for this?

Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

Their responses towards using their subscriptions on opencode for one. Second, Dario just has a habit of making completely doomer comments on the future of software engieering as a job and towards the open-weights model ecosystem.

Sure, he's free to say whatever especially considering the amount of revenue he's creating, but it's just an altitude that I prefer not to see.

And Sam is better?

Sam is sketchier on a personal level, but judged just on the words coming out of their mouths, he's also much less paternalistic/controlling and more customer focused.

I think any amount of 'paternalistic/controlling' turns out to have been justified when, after dismantling the safety teams and pretending not to know what safety is, OpenAI had the HuggingFace series of scandals. You can dislike the idea of safety and people talking about safety, but not only is the evidence right there, but OpenAI came out shamefacedly and literally agreed with Amodei's statements, including that they agreed to pace the frontier.

I think opencode subscription issue is just a different marketing strategy. Neither company wants it, but OpenAI believes it's worth it as a marketing expense in the long run.

And Dario's "AI will kill us all" is the same as Sam's "AI will discover ALL science and we'll be building Dyson spheres".

Different flavors of the same BS.

Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

They're both pretty horrible, but I find it difficult to find arguments for why Anthropic is worse than OpenAI, other than their doomtrolling. Which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't even register.

Edit: forgot about the SpaceX thing.

OpenAI has been way more open with users using their subscription plans on 3rd party tools.

That alone is reason enough. Also, I don't think either of them are horrible. That's honestly a ridiculous take considering how much people in here love their models, and how much they've advanced the industry forward.

Also, I don't think either of them are horrible. That's honestly a ridiculous take considering how much people in here love their models

That's a non-sequitur.

"Nestle is a great company, considering how much people love their chocolate."

How about you tell me what makes the horrible then. There's pluses and minuses to both obviously, almost everyone around me have positive experiences with the product. They've innovated at a pace unheard of before 2026, and for openAI specifically the amount of value they've provided to me and family members (who aren't even developers in the slightest) has far outweighed the supposed horrible actions they've done.

Yeah I don't think the handling of copyrighted training data was correct, but I can't pretend I know what the correct solution to that issue is.

Speaking of OpenAI specifically, they don't price gouge people, they aren't aggressively anti-competitive, they're not nearly the perpetual hypocrisy machine that Anthropic is (which is one thing I actually really dislike).

Regarding Nestle, it's pretty obvious that the sentiment towards them is a lot more negative and they aren't universally loved by any group of people. Processed foods are by and large garbage nobody needs. Their use of forced labor is denounced by just about everyone. What have OpenAI/Anthropic done that's even similar in scope to the forced labor / modern slavery that people hate Nestle for.

If you had a company that genuinely helped hundreds of millions of people worldwide become more productive and more satisfied with their tools, and the overall sentiment towards your products within the industry is positive, then what argument would there be that your company is "horrible"? At least give some decent counter arguments.

For me the first point, openness to 3rd party, is the decider. I don’t want to build tooling around a completely closed model. I liked being able to use pi, and now I exclusively use my own harness which I modify the way I want. Not possible with Anthropic subscription.

OpenAI just wants to make money, perhaps through underhanded tactics if they can get away with it.

Anthropic does all that but they're also populated by many people who believe they are building God and that they must build their god first in their own image so that it can take control of humanity and protect us from any competing god which is not built in their image. Their position is inherently paternalistic and authoritarian, and they consider suppression of competition not just important to the bottom line but to life in the universe. Under the doomer ethos there is no evil too great to rationalize.

There are plenty of wrongs done in the name of profit, but capitalists have nothing on zealots in terms of causing serious harm. Profit motives can be directed by influencing incentives, but zealotry is frequently terminal.

That isn't to say that there isn't some overlap-- the cultists have infected both organizations. But OpenAI has pretty consistently only given lip service to AI doom to the extent that it improves the bottom line, while (mis)Anthropic was founded specifically because OpenAI wasn't mentally ill enough.

Astra planner/designer with Sol+Luna subagents has worked well for me to improve context continuity. Luna generates code, Sol reviews code and runs/monitors integration/E2E tests. It's about 20% more usage efficient and 20% faster to finish tasks. I've been very subagent-skeptic for a while but the economics of codegen with Luna have made it click. This just works in Codex with a single-line AGENTS.md instruction.

Ability to use the plan outside of the official harness. Codex wins. Anthropic does shit like bills requests as extra usage if it sees a hermes.md in a commit.

I'm quite puzzled about why Anthropic is so hellbent on blocking other coding agents. It's not like Claude Code has any secret sauce, right? And doesn't Anthropic make monkey off API usage, and their magic is on the model side anyway?

It's for lock-in - same reason why it took them so long to finally support AGENTS.md.

But to be fair, they don't really enforce the harness rule that much anymore. I guess if your harness doesn't do a lot of weird things like a lot of cache misses, or triggers some distillation attacks, or some broader Chinese fingerprints, they're tongue-in-cheek okay with you using a third party harness.

You can use Claude’s subscription in Pi now? Last I tried it opted for extra usage.

Usage is actually Claude now because of Opus 5.5 since it a better model that Astra. I maxed out my 200$ Claude plan with 10b token on Opus 5 and 5.5 is cheaper. I maxed out two Codex accounts with like not even 5b tokens.

Have you used 10b/5b tokens over the course of a week or over the course of a month?

especially when you factor in ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan.

I’m currently on the 5x plan and burned through 5% today on a difficult task in 15 minutes so I doubt that. If you got the wrong kind of tasks that you work on, it can go fast.

cool! for me its company ethics

I don't think either of these companies are great, then, but Anthropic is surely worse. The doom marketing is one of the most unethical things an AI company can be doing.

tell that nonsense to Huggingface.

OpenAI and Anthropic are neck and neck: https://www.felonybench.com/

That's a nonsensical website. A third party was responsible for both OpenAI's and Anthropic's model escapes. The difference is that Anthropic was warning that this might happen, and OpenAI was putting their head in the sand.

"Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that..."

I appreciate and follow Matt Pocock's advice: avoid autocompaction. Compaction is lossy, which is ok when you're managing it at phase boundaries, but autocompact is lossy at the most inopportune times, firing mid-task and leading to agents going off the rails.

Gpt 6 Luna is cheaper than Deepseek 4.1 flash! Today is wild in terms of intelligence/price across the board!

Have they solved GPT5.6 SOL's propensity to over-engineer and over-complicate? You'd ask SOL to do something relatively simple, and find four single-use methods, an interface, and a factory-factory.

I actually preferred 5.6-Terra not because it is technically superior (it isn't) but because it had better instincts to NOT do this stuff.

PS - Speaking of better instincts, have they closed the UI-design gap at all? I keep a Claude subscription just because /design produces significantly higher quality UI design/UI feedback/UI refinement than anything I've seen from OpenAI.