Recently I learned about Completion Notifications for agentic work within Codex. I told my Codex agents to stop checking on each other and use completion notifications instead. This stopped the orchestrated set of agents from checking on each other with repeated model turns just to report that the work was still running. This started saving my weekly quota to be used on better things than sleep checks every 10 seconds for a 30 minute pytest run.
I just learned that Codex can use one chat to supervise another. These are not subagents, but real threads with one monitoring the other.
I am working on a MetaSkill project, and I wanted to try out GPT-6 Astra’s new capabilities to see whether it would work better as an orchestrator or an implementer. The orchestrator experiment is ongoing, and I will tackle the implementer part next. I asked Astra to create a separate chat for the work, assign it the goal, track it, and steer it toward the outcome I wanted. Astra started a Sol chat at Extra High reasoning (exactly as I asked it to), then created a scheduled task in its own thread that checked the worker every ten minutes.
I used to write Agent Skills as flat instruction files. This basically meant that a set of repeatable instructions I had would be converted into one skill, and before too long, I would have around 50 skills per repo. Each skill described one workflow, and they never called each other. That left a lot of repeated text across them.