Talking to GPT-6 Astra ExHigh is expensive, but letting it run in goal mode seems much cheaper.
With Codex Pro 20X, I observed a pretty counterintuitive effect:
During interactive discussions with Astra ExHigh, my weekly limit drops by roughly 1% per minute.
#codex#astra
For context, my Codex setup is quite clean: no MCPs, and only selected skills totaling around 20k tokens.
But when I let Astra run autonomously in goal mode, it used only about 1% after 35 minutes.
One possible explanation: every interactive turn triggers another deep reasoning pass, while a long-running agent loop can spend much of its time on tools, tests, and local actions without repeatedly invoking the same level of reasoning.