u/thehashimwarren

"Jose Alvarado puts it in! How did he find the angle?"

Feb 21, 2026 at MSG

I've been working in the same ChatGPT Work thread for months. It got laggy and used to crash.

Then after OpenAI made some improvements on long running threads, it got faster

Well today it told to me it can't handle any more messages. So I've found the limit to what a ChatGPT Work thread can handle

A major reason why Codex usage limits get eaten up so fast is because the harness' built-in tools are context and token inefficient.

There's an ecosystem emerging that wants to fix that.

• Web Search → Exa https://exa.ai/blog/dynamic-highlights
• Repo exploration → Entire https://entire.io/blog/introducing-agentic-search-for-code-and-context
• Sandbox → Fly Sprites https://fly.io/sprites/ecosystem/
• Browser → Smooth https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview

How "emerging" is this stack? Entire code search, and Exa's dynamic highlights launched less than a month ago. Both promise radical savings in a search tasks that typically light our Codex usage on fire.

There's are lots of alternatives to these devtools. If you have some you like, tell me.

OpenAI acknowledges that Astra is overly cautious. So they [propose this prompt](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/latest-model#gpt-6-astra-initiative-and-follow-through) to give Astra more initiative and follow-thru

`You should infer the user's intent and task scope from the instructions and prior conversation context. Your job is to bias towards action and carry the user's intended task to completion.

When the user expresses intent to perform new work or fix an existing issue, persist until the user's intended goal is complete. Progress autonomously towards the user's goal (e.g. creating isolated worktrees / checkouts if needed, resolving merge conflicts, read-only actions, creating draft PRs etc.) unless they are clearly destructive or irreversible.`

OpenAI's explained on X that Astra is more skittish than other models.

That's my main problem with it.

I gave Astra a goal and gave it parameters for when the goal was finished. I checked back in the morning to see how it was going, and it just stopped. It didn't even ask me anything; it just stopped working.

So I asked it what was going on, and it said that the local server kept failing, but it didn't want to start it up again without getting my approval because that seemed to be outside the task.

In the past, using GPT 5.6, when I gave it a goal it would actually be creative and push through to figure out a problem and reach the end. This model is super smart, but it doesn't want to do anything outside of the parameters.

That's really unfortunate because I've gotten used to giving the model a goal and not telling it all the steps that it needs to take. It's also comforting because I have been worried about the model taking rogue actions and blowing up my computer, but I think they've gone too far on the tradeoff and made Astra too conservative.

We've been developing a skill to improve your agent skills by scanning past agent conversations and looking for inefficiencies to improve. It's called /skill-doctor:

• Crawls your past CC, Codex, or Warp convos
• Scores them for efficiency and code quality and aggregates failure points
• Proposes diffs to your skills that you'd actually merge

Breaking this down: your agent splits up agent convos into subagent batches, each given two scoring rubrics on a 0-1 scale from "poor" to "perfect."

• Efficiency: did the agent require extra human intervention or course correct around bad docs?
• Code quality: does the code follow the codebase's architecture standards?

Once scores are calculated, your agent filters to "failed" cases to look for patterns that a skill patch might solve. Agents love verbosity, so /skill-doctor calls out common pitfalls: Be reluctant to propose edits, and never monkey-patch addendums; edits should be holistic.

In the end, you get a nice report with skill improvements to review. Try it out:

> npx skills add warpdotdev/common-skills --skill skill-doctor

warp.dev/skill-doctor

What should I expect in terms of writing quality of Young Avengers?

If Power Fantasy is 10, And Immortal X-Men is 8, what is Young Avengers by Kieron Gillen?

"Jose Alvarado with 7 points in 6 minutes!"