After almost 1 year without traveling for work, I spent a few days last week in Tenerife with some of my colleagues. For those who don’t know, that’s part of the secret sauce that makes a fully-distributed company like Automattic work. We spend 2-3 weeks per year traveling to meet with our teammates.
During the meetup, I ran into my colleague Adam, who shared that he has been able to run 80 concurrent Codex sessions, resulting in spending over 120 billion tokens. If you are not familiar with token usage, 120 billion (120,000,000,000,000) is a crazy amount of tokens. A heavy user will probably spend a few hundred million tokens per month on average, but increasing that by 10x or even 100x is not straightforward at all, and doing so effectively to achieve good results is truly an art nowadays.
Part of the challenge when you are running so many agents in parallel is to find effective ways to orchestrate them. If you are curious, I have two other colleagues who have been working in this field for a month and have open-sourced the tool they’ve created: Radical Pipelines.
I’m convinced that in a few years, these numbers will be the norm, but that’s exactly why I’m writing this post: to remember how it felt in the early days.