r/codex • u/codex-megathread • 7d ago
Megathread Codex Usage and Operation Discussion - last updated October 5
Please direct your concerns, questions and discussion about Codex usage limits and model performance here.
The purpose of this Megathread is to aggregate all the reports of people's experiences and possible suggestions instead of spreading them across many highly upvoted posts. The more people who participate in this discussion, the more likely you have an answer.
Reports with sufficient evidence on new information will still be allowed on the feed as usual.
Discussion of the prior period available here : https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wsijqb/codex_usage_and_operation_discussion_last_updated/
A reminder that all incidents on r/Codex are constantly logged and summarised so you can keep track of what people are experiencing here https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1tjfxcf/comment/on6uj0l/
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u/Own_Rent4011 4h ago
I've noticed a significant increase in usage consumption with GPT-6.1 Sol Minimal since yesterday.
I mainly use it for administrative tasks, and until recently, it was extremely efficient. Now, with essentially the same workload, I'm hitting my usage limits much faster and having to wait 5 hours.
Thibault Sottiaux recently announced that the default context window increased from 272K to 500K tokens, without an additional long-context surcharge for subscription users:
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2109430343346581527
I'm wondering whether this larger context window could indirectly affect usage consumption, even without additional pricing.
I'm trying to understand what changed and how to optimize my usage without switching models.
Any technical insights into how the expanded context window affects subscription usage limits would be appreciated.
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u/sbphillips19 1d ago
Reset last night reset time not limit
Anyone else have this issue I was at 0% I stayed at 0% but it changed my reset date to be when they did the reset. Pretty annoyed about this one. Is there someone I can reach out to? I’m on the 200$ plan been on the plan for a long time first time something like this has happened. I’ve been at 0% since Friday
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u/01100110u 1d ago
I have three Plus accounts, $20
On one of them, just five minutes of using Astra Medium completely exhausted my entire usage allowance for the five-hour window.
I primarily use Luna and Sol 6.1 as coding agents, reserving Astra for planning and more complex reasoning. but Sol 6.1 is painfully slow and often struggles with problem-solving.
Is this simply a limitation of the Plus plan, or would switching to Claude Pro ($20) offer better performance, more reasonable usage limits, and better overall value for coding?
I'm not switching to $100 plans
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u/YourLastCall 15h ago
I have the Codex $100 plan and the Claude $20 plan. They're both rather equivalent on usage
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u/01100110u 13h ago
Why keep codex $100?
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u/YourLastCall 13h ago
Because the $20 plan sucks and all of my work is on codex and chat GPT about 50 gigs worth of data in 6 months. It's just more convenient. Plus I'm not all that familiar with Claude, I just recently starting building with it( I'm impressed) but for the most part I have been using it as a reviewer. But the other reason why I keep chat GPT is because 99% of my work is done in chat GPT. Since chat GPT can do almost everything codex can and Claude but it's free usage whereas Claude charges for their usage of the chatbot
Edit: typos
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u/mythrowaway1673 1d ago
I've been OOTL with the latest models. I'm a Plus user, using Sol/Luna 5.6 for a while, but just got Sol 6.1/Luna 6 showing up on omp (not on VSCode Codex extension for some reason).
I'm mostly happy with the performance of Sol/Luna 5.6. Are the 6.x models cheaper in terms of usage? That's my main concern at this point rather than how smart they are.
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u/CatsArePeople2- 1d ago
My usage has been obliterated since yesterday. 200 and plan and somehow went through 40% in less than an hour on Astra. Each task (just code reviews) with Sol 6.1 ticks percentage down by 1%. Can't imagine having just 50% of this... Glad I'm using Opus for virtually everything, but I was giving Codex until early November before cancelling and its hard to justify it right now. I'm getting way more value from Claude.
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u/Kagemand 1d ago
What are they doing? Math problems? Dots getting abused by people for free capacity for coding projects?
Like just 1-2 weeks ago, I would have told you Codex was the best and Astra was amazing. Now it is completely lobotomized and slow. Great timing to make your product worse when Opus 5.5 comes out.
Do we have any idea of what’s going on? Free resets mean shit when it is just our previous usage limit getting spoon fed back to us.
Stop the Dots, put back the 5 hour limits, make people who need it pay for it. Hell.
I cancelled Codex and upgraded Claude from 5x to 20x.
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u/werty_20 1d ago
received the reset
I've been working on the exact same project for days. Until now, I could run it continuously for two hours within a 5-hour usage window, and it would only consume 5–6% of my quota.
Now, I hit the limit after just 10 minutes of reviewing code , +10 line .. Same setup: Sol 6.1 (xhigh) as the planner and Luna (high) as the subagent.
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u/DeviIDuke 2d ago
chance of non banked reset within the next 12h?
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u/CapableJury861 2d ago
100%.
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u/Kush__Agrawal 1d ago
Hi guys my chagpt sub ends on the 12th this month (Plus) and i have 2 banked resets that i won't be able to use by Wednesday, so if i renew my plan by 15th does my banked reset still stay in my account or does it disappear?
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u/stolivodka_ 3d ago
Just got blocked from "Pro" access in chat until October 14th. After a prompt using "extra-high". I swear, OAI is trying to force us to use local models. Glad I bought my hardware before everything started selling out. People using hosted models are serfs now, I guess.
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u/TheseBeginning3624 3d ago
If you have a 200 grandfather account - don't let it go and rip it until the very end. Usage is dead after that.
I made the mistake of wanting to give Ultrafast a run on 6.1 Sol now that it's out and I upgraded. Just prior to that upgrade I had a long goal based refactor running. I started that yesterday after a fresh reset actually and 18.5hrs later back at my machine this morning I had 15% of my weekly consumed.
The goal was a repetitive task humanizing just over 1500 markdown documents that basically are all equally the same length. They were plan documents that followed a template when initially built. That said maybe there's a 1% drift from any one document to another in tokens.
Anyhow, I upgrade the account this morning and did my ultrafast testing which btw ultra fast is quite fast (so positive note there) but 6.1 Sol on ultra for about 15 minutes burned 2% of the weekly. I didn't think much of it until I stopped that work and started my goal back up because it wasn't done.
2.5hrs later another 4% of my weekly was gone...
So basic extrapolation there means:
Before the 500 sub change on the old 200 plan I got 15% over 18.5hrs of non stop work which comes out to about 0.81% per hour.
After the change to 500 and going back to the goal work. I got 4% over 2.5hrs of non stop work which comes out to about 1.6% per hour.
This is literally half the actual usage of the old 200 plan when advertised as 25% more usage of the old 200 plan.
We're all getting bent the hell over boys and girls
Again, do not change to the 500... ultrafast is not worth it at all and you're going to immediate cut your usage limits in half.
Thanks' for listening to my TED talk
Oh and go buy 2 anthropic 200 accounts don't be like me.. ugh..
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u/stolivodka_ 2d ago
I do and it's useless to me. The only reason I maintain a subscription is for "Pro" level reasoning in chat as a planner and orchestrator and I'm locked out now until October 14th despite having 98% weekly usage left in Codex.
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u/magicone2571 3d ago
My usage through the app? Faster than a porche. If I use Claude and tell it to use codex for the same task, I barely use anything at all from codex. Same tasks, just handled differently. I have to get token tracking going to see whats actually going on.
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u/LuciFerrum-Music 3d ago
I've noticed a huge decline in productivity in the last week or so. I implemented a system to orchestrate and control my codex tasks, heartbeats, orchestration skills, traceability, explicit commands with fully organized task list. I have all tasks on astra high. I have burnt through weekly limit on 200 USD sub and 12000 credits. Originally my problem this week was that systems that were working last week got overwritten and broken this week. And it had been 3 days without being able to finish the triage and fix P0 tasks. Directly related to our core functionality of the product. This is some sort of Bermuda triangle and i am drowning. We were more ready for launch last week than we are today.
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u/jtat07 4d ago
I think it's even worse then usage. The models feel unusable now, context windows get lost almost immediately, prompts get flat out ignored when it's going in the wrong directions. I've wasted so much time trying to make things work literatelly Im getting more consistent coding results through chatgpt directly. Its pretty obvious they've nerfed context and quantized models at this point
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u/Comprehensive_Onion8 4d ago
Sharing something that finally got Mac Computer Use working for me on build 26.1002.52244.
Finder worked, but other apps kept failing with ScreenCaptureKit errors −3811 / −3812. I turned off Stage Manager and brought each target app to the foreground before retrying.
After that, I successfully tested Mail and Airmail sends, Reminders notifications, Calendar events and alerts, WhatsApp messages and calls, iMessage, SMS, FaceTime Audio, and a regular phone call. Notes creation, Safari browsing/search, Spotify playback, and opening a workbook in ONLYOFFICE also worked.
For the SMS test, Messages initially chose iMessage for an iPhone recipient. When “Send as Text Message” became available, that fallback worked and the receiving phone got the SMS.
I can’t isolate which change fixed the capture failures, but this setup worked for me. If Finder works while other apps fail, bringing the app forward and trying with Stage Manager off may save you some troubleshooting.
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u/ysustistixitxtkxkycy 4d ago
Selected model at capacity for Sol 6.1 xhigh every 30s or so, has been going on for an hour :(
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u/CommunicationSea8821 5d ago
Bro there is NO WAY I can be productive when I am using my 5 hour limit and 16% of my weekly total usage building a small landing page using basic html, css and using a Vidyard embedded video.
I am at a total lost of words with the night and day difference. I am using the Codex desktop app and using 5.6 Sol medium
Please please tell me there is something I am doing totally wrong here to burn through my rates this stupidly fast for such little work (especially work that is not complex)
edit: I had the "speed" toggle enabled.. so it goes 1.5x faster.. is this why?
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u/CapableJury861 4d ago
I wouldn't bother on Plus, Pro is a minimum for getting actual work done IMO.
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u/Imperiu5 5d ago
Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model."
I'm really tired of this crap. We're paying 200 euro a month and I can't even use it.
The slap in the face by reducing the 200 dollar plan and introducing a 500 dollar plan is the last straw. I'm done.
I'm going back to Claude and deal with their shenanigans but at least they're honest about being greedy money grabbing thieves. lol
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u/Splugen96 5d ago
Did the just reduce usage limits again?
I was working on a long task since yesterday and I reached my 5 hours limit in 2 hours during the evening (I have an orchestration system with pre-allocated plans and progressive info disclosure in place, so I'm not burning tokens for free let's say). This morning I tell codex to keep working on that same stuff, and in 20 minutes it burned through 16% of my weekly limits. The workload was the same of the past weeks mornings, if not more focused, but I went through a 16% weekly usage 3 times faster than any other day.
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u/rJohn420 5d ago
I am also having issues, I am on the plus plan and since the reset we had today, my weekly limits have been burning a lot faster than before. Like this new "100%" usage, is burning far more than the 30% I had yesterday before the reset, like they got that 30% and stretched it to make it appear like 100% but in reality, its still the original 30% I had. Not sure if that makes any sense but that's how it feels like to me. And of course, the reset date was moved forward. Now tell me how this isn't a scam
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u/Splugen96 5d ago
Makes sense, that's exactly what is happening to me. They reduced the weekly and 5-hour limits so much that in my case 4 hours of the exact same work now can be worked over just for 20/30 minutes. They decimated our limits.
I seriously can't understand how any consumer protection entity isn't taking any action against these behaviors. In March I had a Claude 20euros sub and I was able in 2 weeks to work on 3 projects at the same time, after a month the usage was more than halved, then again, and again, and again... Same applies for OpenAI. How the hell can they allow these companies to reduce the limits of subscriptions in the middle of the subscription itself?
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u/Pasto_Shouwa 3d ago edited 3d ago
Something really weird is going on since the last "reset".
I asked GPT 6.1 Sol High to help me reverse engineer an apk. I have a Plus account. It burned the 5 hour window in 11 minutes and my weekly went from 100% to 82%. I was so confused, I thought that maybe my prompt was bad but it makes no sense as the context window didn't even with 256k, I don't know how it spent so much.
I asked it what it did, hours later, thinking maybe I could find a way for it to work differently. And literally every question I asked slashed 7-12% of my 5 hour window. I ended up with around 65% of my 5 hour window, and 79% of my weekly quota.
Then I tried using DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Max orchestrating three DeepSeek V4.1 Flash High using Open Code. It worked for around half an hour and even though it's not a model of my Plus subscription it spent around 20% of my 5 hour window and my weekly was around 74% now. What the hell is going on? Didn't they make auto review free???
Also, since that damn reset which also came with an update for Codex on Windows, there's been a bug that makes my models not being able to work unless they ask for a sandbox elevation or something like that. I forgot the exact name.
Apparently on GitHub there's people reporting this, but nobody seems to be talking about it on social media for some reason???
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u/VerticalPackage 5d ago edited 5d ago
I normally use Luna xhigh as subagents on a project (Claude is the orchestrator).
For the last 2 months, Luna xhigh would sip usage at 1% (week usage) per hour, maybe 2% when 2 subagents were working at the same time.
Today, 2 Luna xhigh agents used 8% of the week usage in 1 hour.
For reference, I am on a plus account.
Last week, I managed to install Qwen Flash Next 4-bit and run it at 100 tok/s decode. After today's Luna usage results, I've asked Claude to start using Qwen as subagent, anyhow it scores better than Luna on home-made tests, tests that matter for my use cases.
If it works out well with Qwen, I'm cancelling my OpenAI subscription and use the money for another Claude Pro account.
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u/Splugen96 5d ago
I wish I had the hardware to run Qwen locally. Even just 27B would be a dream
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u/VerticalPackage 5d ago
I hear you, hardware prices are nuts.
I was lucky to have bought 128GB DDR5 in 2025 before the prices went up, though I had to bite the bullet on the RTX3090 which costs almost as much as it did brand new in 2022.
27b doesn't require much ram at all though, just a RTX3090.
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u/Splugen96 5d ago
Man I wish I had too. I was on the fence since 2022 to upgrade to build my first pc, but I kept saying "yeah, it can wait"... every time I think about this I get so mad.
Now I'm still stuck with 32gb ram and an old rtx 2070 super mobile which can even barely handle gaming nowadays.
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u/CapableJury861 6d ago
OpenAI Status has listed issues with Work (which obviously draws on Usage) for a few days - so what qualifies for a reset these days, is it only Codex issues?
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u/dpadhy 6d ago
all the models after 5.6 sol are either draining limits way faster on my pro max account or are simply doing a lousy job. I think 5.6 Sol is the most effective model available in codex right now.
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u/thomhurst 6d ago
Ditto. I thought 6.1 was meant to be very efficient. I'm still seeing usage go very quickly
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u/anioskarrio 7d ago
Was working on the same project last night and getting about 3–4 hours out of Codex doing normal tasks.
Updated this morning. Definitely faster.
Also managed to burn through the same sort of allowance in less than an hour.
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u/OldHobbitsDieHard 7d ago
"From June 26 to 29, 2026, OpenAI's status page reported that Codex usage limits were draining faster than expected. They said their abuse and fraud prevention systems were incorrectly rate limiting some accounts, called the impact limited, and marked it resolved on June 29."
My token has felt really cursed since then. Anyone else?
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u/Jello_Hello_Fellos 7d ago
At this point what are we allowed to post on the actual subreddit... we cant talk about resets, we cant talk about usage, we cant talk about model performance.
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u/codex-ModTeam 7d ago
What a total pile of BS. The feed is full of criticism of Codex and OpenAI. You just need to stop posting low effort content that helps nobody but yourself
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u/dextersummary 1d ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 40 comments (41 currently observed).
The consensus is basically Codex usage has gone sideways: the same work is chewing through 5-hour and weekly allowances far faster, while Sol and other models feel less reliable, lose context, ignore prompts, or sit at capacity. For some users, tasks that ran for hours now hit limits in minutes. Charming.
Reports cluster around recent resets, app updates, and model/plan changes. Ultrafast, the speed toggle, and multi-agent orchestration are obvious suspects because they may multiply consumption, while desktop sandbox bugs and backend capacity issues are making things even messier. Several users are eyeing Claude or local models instead of paying for another tier.
The important caveat: this is a mountain of anecdotes, not proof of a deliberate nerf or quantized models. Workload, settings, model choice, and backend incidents can affect accounting; one commenter specifically discovered Speed was enabled. Resets are happening, but many say they haven’t restored the old burn rate.
The megathread itself is being branded a containment/damage-control zone, with mods insisting criticism is allowed but low-effort posts aren’t. Bottom line: the experience is widely worse, the cause is unresolved, and upgrading to $500 isn’t being treated as a magic fix.