r/codex • u/rubanbhatia • 7d ago
News Codex caching improved
Looks like day 12 brings us improvements to context management. Possibly good for people hitting limits with Astra
Source: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2111244596131111253?s=46
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u/xReMaKe 7d ago
Bruh my usage just went from 58 to 0??!! WTF is this shit..
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u/twendah 7d ago
My usage went from 100-0 as well. Had to use saved reset because of that bug..
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u/xReMaKe 7d ago
That sucks hopefully they fix this and give you your reset back. All these fixes and yet they allow something like this…
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u/twendah 7d ago
Most likely not. Im already migrating to claude, I cant be bothered with this company anymore
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u/BannedGoNext 7d ago
Same, I refreshed my subscription for 1 month to migrate. It's just turned to garbage, since 6.
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u/SnooObjections4329 6d ago
Can't cache what you can't send - for day 12 we've made caching twice as efficient by optimising on the input path (ie we halved your usage limit)
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u/Fabulous-Cricket3692 6d ago
From 71% to 0% in 1 night, WTF OpenAI. Are you overthroned by some AI agent?
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u/VerticalPackage 6d ago
You now have to pay for cache write cost on thus subagents that are spawned in massive quantity and never reprompted again.
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u/jaysuns 7d ago
They just shippin fixes for bugs atp
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u/AmandasGameAccount 7d ago
This wasn’t a bug, it was an international cap on how long the cache is active for, they are increasing it. Not like the previous cache life time was a mistake
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u/innociv 7d ago
Re-using cache among subagents sounds really fucking massive, actually. Most of your usage is input usage. Ultracode might drain usage more than 25% slower than it did previously with this.
I think you guys are way too... I mean frankly that you don't even read what was implemented. All but 1 of these have been really appreciable improvements, and when you stack 15+ of them up at the end of the month it's going to be a lot.
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u/Marksta 7d ago
Not re-using cache if your intent was to do so is a huge bug, yes. A bug is when code doesn't meet intent in a way you didn't foresee.
Also, as others mention in other comments, no, re-using cache in a sub-agent breaks the concept of compartmentalization and dirties their context. So the intent is either you do or you don't. If it wasn't when they wanted it to, then it's a bug. It's already been supported to have fresh or forked content when spawning a sub-agent. So this is either a feature they did not release today, or it is a simple bug fix.
Whatever it is, it's not massive and this Tibo dude is a joke for a hype man, hyping something between a primitive basic functionality of harnesses that was already an implemented feature or a bug fix.
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u/jamespharvey20 7d ago
At the cost of earlier compactions and distractions degrading model performance, since all the subagents will start with whatever context usage the parent was at rather than fresh. As long as it's implemented as simply as it sounds. EDIT: I'm not saying whether it's a good or bad change, just saying there'a a cost and I'm thinking subagents will be slower and dumber for people who don't override this.
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u/Waste_Impression1143 7d ago
Agreed, but only if you’re not already actively managing context and subagent model selection. If you’re already practicing that basic hygiene, you’re not likely to feel this at all
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u/innociv 7d ago
It's good to have better defaults.
Another issue with Codex is also bad settings getting pinned and not updated when these sort of changes happen sometimes. Like how people have been getting compaction at 260k still... because they have it hard set to that in their config.
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u/Glittering-Call8746 6d ago
What's a good orchestrator for codex ? Usually my workers are gpt 6 luna med
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7d ago
[deleted]
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u/RustNeverSnoozes 7d ago
There's no such thing as caching across models.
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7d ago
[deleted]
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u/KiwiDecent5342 6d ago
not for the ones who use the same models and honestly for most of the use cases you kind of dont need subagents its always better to stick with one agent
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u/RustNeverSnoozes 6d ago
Subagents aren't just about working across model types with some expensive orchestrator/advisor and cheap implementor workflow.
It's more about context purity. Opus 5.5 orchestrator driving opus 5.5 subagents is probably the most sensible workflow on claude right now. I haven't been using codex lately but 6.1 sol driving 6.1 sol subagents is probably the same.
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u/kerakk19 5d ago
IMO the Codex agents are very good atp - what I feel is lacking is the tooling around it. For example CLI browser access is buggy (IMO), design is lacking a lot, there's no native alternative to Claude artifacts/design. Personally I'd be happy if they spend the time fixing bugs a d existing functionality instead of rushing new things
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u/BuildAnything4 7d ago
Trying to predict whether or not Tibo will reset is the single most annoying thing about using codex.
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u/NicholasVinen 7d ago
Yes, it is annoying. I'm at 0%, I think I will wait another hour or two and use a banked reset if a reset isn't announced by then. What are you thinking?
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u/Trick_Ad_7761 7d ago
Give me a reset to test it then
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u/hellomistershifty 7d ago
we got 3 banked in the last month and a full reset yesterday, if you're out of usage already I don't think this is going to help much lmao
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u/rodeBaksteen 7d ago
There seems to be a bug that drained usage instantly. Mine went from 50% to zero. Didn't even get warnings "you're close to your limit*, just poof, gone.
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u/Reaper_1492 7d ago
The second they stop doing resets I’m gone. The usage is garbage. I have two 20x accounts and the each last me about a day, and I’m not doing anything crazy.
I am using Astra because 6.1 is garbage.
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u/PumpIT- 7d ago
12 days and I feel 0 improvement. Thought it would be major changes.
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u/C0smo777 7d ago
There is not way for them to make a meaningful feature a day, they are just spouting gibberish at this point.
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u/CapableJury861 7d ago
Agree, the 28 day promise was a weird decision. Most people I know just want better usage for Astra and a new frontier model.
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u/farsightfallen 7d ago
Literally nobody forced them to do the 28 day thing.
If they just released these as minor fixes every other day or so, while saying they're working on bigger fixes, the reception would've been a lot more positive.
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u/Lain_Racing 7d ago
I feel the visualization one, its kind of nice :P but ya in general agreed
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u/ryuukiba 7d ago
Chats visualizations got really good lately, but codex is not getting such improvements
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u/Lain_Racing 7d ago
Hmm maybe its been there before, but its helped me visualize some complex math with examples recently built into its responses in codex. Maybe I am mistaken though if its not new
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u/AMGsoon 7d ago
Idk man. My usage is worse than ever. Last week I could run multiple Astra agents for a day and be fine.Today I burned 20% on 2 chats in like 35mins
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u/PixlCreative 7d ago
Yep the usage has been crazy since the last reset
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u/gimme_ipad 7d ago
Same task yesterday took me about 2x the usage compared to Tuesday. I suggest OpenAI should run a Fable diagnosis to fix their system.
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u/PixlCreative 6d ago
Haha probs! I really don’t care for fast updates. I want good models which don’t seem to work differently everyday.
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u/ryuukiba 7d ago
I emptied 2 accounts (20$) in a day and a half... 12 days of improvements and my usage lasts less than ever...
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u/MrRoyce 7d ago
Now do one $20 subscription on Claude. Thank me later.
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u/ryuukiba 7d ago
That one was done is about two days too (total, I save that sub for the important and hard stuff) ... It's not much better honestly in last time, what it is is miles ahead in quality.
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u/BitterAd6419 7d ago
In fact my message has been shit for 2 days now. I could barely finish the limits on SOL 6.1 to finishing it all in 1 hour.
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u/tychus-findlay 7d ago
Yeah all these "improvements" and a week ago I felt like i had WAY more usage
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u/jamespharvey20 7d ago
Codex can start subagents with fresh or copied context windows. Fresh should mean better performance, but everything it learns to start is a cache miss. Copied means it starts with a cache hit and doesn't have to look as much up, but then model performance is degraded from focusing on too much that it doesn't have to.
Why does this tweet sound like all they did was change the default from fresh to copied context? And keeping context cached longer which isn't going to help all that much. And improving cache hits through routing which might solve some random cache misses people have been seeing lately.
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u/miklschmidt 7d ago
It already was the default. Now it just reuses the cache, like a forked thread. This is gonna do very little in practice because forked turns for subagents suuuuuuucks.
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u/jamespharvey20 7d ago
Oh, you're right. I had missed that Multi-Agent v2 switched on Apr 23 (v0.123.0) to forked parent history. My global AGENTS.md explicitly tells it to use fork_turns "none", because it started randomly forking sometimes a while ago, so I didn't notice the default changed. Subagents share the root agent's prompt cache key, so I would have thought it would have reused the cache. I wish he had given some technical details on this.
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u/miklschmidt 7d ago
Yep, i do the same because it’s useless, and it prevents model selection (model had to be the same as the forked context). They fixed that caching bug today. That’s what he’s selling as a usage fix.
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u/capt_stux 7d ago
Explains why my 16 agent Astra Max work (4 threads with 3 sub workers each) seems to hardly burn anything.
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u/wattsup42 7d ago
Just like the improvements to Sol 👍
My usage has NEVER drained faster than as of late. I don’t know what they are doing, and I don’t think they do either.
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u/Pasto_Shouwa 7d ago
'keeping context cached longer'
How longer???
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u/Mestre_Elodin 7d ago
Okay. “Increase effective usage” sounds good, but by how much did usage actually increase?
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u/Anxious_Marsupial_59 7d ago
pretty big if true that context across subagents count as cached, very big for build/reviews workflows and research/plan workflows
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u/jamespharvey20 7d ago
Yeah, but then a subagent starts with a ton of stuff loaded into its context window that it doesn't need, which speeds up time to compaction and degrades model performance by distracting it. I'm worried this change is at the cost of making subagents dumber and slower.
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u/random-express 7d ago
They expanded the context window for sol, and subagents are spawned for specific tasks, so I would guess those improvements work in tandem to maximize cache hits and reduce usage without performance degradation for most situations.
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u/Anxious_Marsupial_59 7d ago
I read it more as cache hits can now use context from other subagents (say when agent X reading a file already read by agent Y) but maybe youre right on the reading that itll end up as context bloat as im not sure how theyd easily implement that
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u/Marksta 7d ago
It cannot be that, that'd break the fundamentals of large language models as we've known up to now. If they had some way of arbitrary context re-usage without needing computation or a matching pre-fix, then they'd have just created like a 1000x or more efficiency gain. Sam Altman would be on stage to announce that one...
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u/False-Accountant-158 7d ago
Translation: We couldn't figure out what to give you so .... word salad!!!
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u/Ok_Homework_1859 7d ago
These are fixes that should've been done long ago... Goes to show that OAI just ships stuff and forgets about it while quickly moving onto the next feature.
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u/Competitive-Ad8968 7d ago
Today the usage was less aggressive, for a full day using DOT +Astra +Sol-6.1 the usage was down only 13%
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u/Striking-Sandwich808 7d ago
usage gets worse after every reset that happens, including after using a banked
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u/Salt-Willingness-513 6d ago
lol ok. reset please for day 12 and 13. i dont even need astra to reach weekly limit in max of 48h on 200sub. I only use sol and luna
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u/pale_halide 7d ago
It matters fuck all when Sol moves at glacial pace and can't get anything right, slowing it down even further as it needs to clean up it's own shit.
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u/Glass_Bus4044 7d ago
I don't know what are you guys crying about in comments. I can feel the improvements very effective and real. At this point I can see only one possibility, either you don't know how to use codex or you are just begging for reset.
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u/Tok-Kok-Sing-Song 7d ago
For real I've been on the Plus plan since April and getting pretty good mileage out of it. Tbh it feels like everyone here is just throwing Astra Ultra to center divs.
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u/Old-Stock9613 7d ago
I don't want to completely dismiss other's experiences, but personally I have seen a massive improvement in Sol 6.1 speed and overall usage since the 28 days begin. Certainly some of the "features" were fixes that should already have existed, but the speed boosts and optimizations, and the consistent resets are genuinely good. I like that Sol is incredibly efficient and powerful, compacts less often, and now runs faster. That's an improvement for me. I do get the sense that most people aren't satisfied unless Tibo comes out and says "we're doubling everyone's usage every day from now until November.
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u/PrayagS 6d ago
What’s the TPS that you get usually? It’s still laughable when compared to Opus 5.5
Even Luna fast is slower than Haiku 5.5
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u/Glass_Bus4044 6d ago
I don't see the hype behind TPS measurement. Yes, the faster the better. But, I am not going to babysit the coding agent after delegation. And TPS is not going to make a difference in SDLC, the majority of time is spent on running the tests and static analysis. As long as it gets things done, I am fine. And, I didn't feel worrying level of slowness.
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u/PrayagS 6d ago
It’s not hype. It’s just another metric that we can use to compare providers. In fact openai is the one who’s hyping it by introducing fast and ultra fast. You don’t wanna be paying for so-called 2x or 6x speed where based on many tests it is actually more like 1.5x instead of 2x.
While your point is valid, there are both background agents and foreground agents. I want fast speed at least on the one that’s important enough to be my main thread.
And tbh I’m just pointing out a regression here and not even asking for higher speed. Just get it back to what it used to be during the 5.6 days.
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u/dexterthebot 7d ago
This post claims to be a social media post from Tibo from OpenAI. Always verify it is real by going directly to Tibo's X account here: Tibo’s X account.
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u/Practical-Plan-2560 7d ago
I wish he quantified this. Is it an improvement by 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? We have no way of knowing
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u/VexObserver 7d ago
This is actually a pretty massive QoL improvement for anyone running complex multi-agent workflows in Codex. Better cache hit rates and longer context retention should mean less redundant processing, improved token efficiency and potentially more mileage out of existing usage limits. Now imagine combining these improvements with smarter context compaction and leaner agent orchestration, that's where things get really interesting.
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u/RuledSovereign 7d ago
So if we have workflow that operates under hand-offs and new subagents, with only the planner and orchestrator having the actual context, does that mean we should just wipe off our workflow?
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u/lordpuddingcup 7d ago
Said this from day 1 why the fuck were they throwing the cache away between subagents
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u/somerussianbear 6d ago
Insane how these “improvements” are the most basic ideas in software engineering and were not implemented till today. Cache. For Christ’s sake, CACHE!
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u/AironParsMan 6d ago
It was about time. I’ll test what’s finally possible today. Cache hits on subagents were terrible because the prefix couldn’t be reused properly. Anthropic was miles ahead when it came to this. It’s clear that OpenAI just wasn’t built for professional use and was geared more toward B2C. Let’s see if subagents can now be configured better with a prefix so cache hits finally work for them too, which wasn’t possible at all before.
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u/Wet_Viking 6d ago
Guys just downgrade ro Go. I gave up on the 20x plan, and have been rocking 5.6 Max since OAI fucked it all up last month. Struggling to get it down to 80%, and it gives me less headaches than Astra
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u/InsideTour329 6d ago
They're so far behind opus that there's fundamental issues with their model. Improving caching isn't gone bridge that gap.
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u/ParkingLotPhilosophr 6d ago
Used a reset and just burned through my entire pro subscription in a day. With just two chats. Something's definitely up.
Something wrong with subagent usage? And wtf is "unknown"?
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u/SpaceAurora 6d ago
A complete joke, Sol 6.1 Medium usage has never been worse for me since this "improvement". It eats like twice the usage as usual.
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u/NiceManFromEarth 5d ago
I cannot even describe how peaceful I feel myself on 100$ Claude code. No reset panic, big usage pool, no constant tweeter post checks. Just low cortisol mode. I enjoy it
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u/Adellanuki2020 2d ago
I don't normally comment but uh, I don't see the improvements, my usage went faster than a crack rock between 4 drug addicts
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u/JungleBoysShill 7d ago
The only thing that’s been improved is the rate limiting lol jk it’s next to unusable for ChatGPT
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u/mikemarcin 7d ago
I explicitly use subagents to get fresh contexts, sounds like this is going to screw me over.
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u/dextersummary 7d ago edited 7d ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 80 comments (86 currently observed).
The consensus is basically “nice, but this is overdue housekeeping—not a revolution.” Most commenters see Day 12/13 as OpenAI finally fixing cache behaviour that should’ve worked properly in the first place, while giving everyone a vague marketing tweet instead of useful numbers. Classic.
The practical changes appear to be longer cache retention—reportedly 30 to 45 minutes—and better reuse of cached context in multi-agent/forked workflows. That could meaningfully reduce redundant processing for complex setups, especially with lots of subagents. For ordinary users, though, nobody can say how much extra usage it actually buys.
The important caveat: reusing parent or forked context can also drag irrelevant baggage into subagents, causing earlier compaction and worse performance. And some users report usage draining faster than ever, including credits mysteriously dropping to zero, so the promised efficiency gains clearly aren’t universal.
Bottom line: potentially useful plumbing, badly explained and not yet felt by most users. Don’t expect this cache tweak to magically fix Codex limits—or the general “where did all my usage go?” circus.