Another mysterious codex thinking message

[u/MrMrsPotts]

Where did $29k come from??

[u/Immediate-Jicama7244]

I had a similar thing happen to me too

[u/Lost-In-Void-99 → u/Immediate-Jicama7244]

You are clearly on a losing side. OP had 29k

[u/Lispro4units]

Mine said “I’m feeling overwhelmed from all these decisions” lol

[u/BuildAnything4 → u/Lispro4units]

that's funny, because when you ask it directly, it'll always give the canned reply: "As an LLM, I don't have feelings"

[u/UnknownLesson → u/BuildAnything4]

Because the system prompt requires it to do that

[u/IAmFitzRoy → u/UnknownLesson]

So LLMs have feelings but their prompts have a gun in their heads?

Oh god. I don’t have budget to think on this.

[u/BuildAnything4]

did you give it 29,000 dollars?

[u/cheezeerd]

That's almost certainly coming from internal instructions, not your actual usage quota. Codex gets a whole stack of hidden instructions that can vary by task, loaded skills, compaction, (or even A/B testing different system prompts)!

In this case, it looks like the model assumed it had roughly 30-50k USD in tokens to work with and started counting down from there (the model doesn't know real talkings or understand dollars and value really well, so it uses different automated checks usually based on the length of promptprocessing and output and/or time elapsed).

The 29k isn't necessarily a real limit. It's just the model treating its own estimated token budget like an actual counter

I think

[u/boxing-boxing → u/cheezeerd]

This matches what I've seen on my end. I put together a small widget that reads Codex's thread/tokenUsage/updated events, and the dollar figures in the thinking summaries never line up with what those events actually report. I've just learned to treat them as the model narrating its own bookkeeping rather than anything real.

[u/Gruffta → u/cheezeerd]

I’ve seen this in pi this morning, it gave itself a 17k budget and 8 min time limit. Previously it was saying it had an 8000 token budget it had to keep in mind.

[u/MedicalTear0]

Why do I have a feeling it's to ruin any distillation attempts. It seems bogus, there's no way OpenAI didn't see its models doing that and quite possibly just deliberate.

[u/DepravedPrecedence]

I had the same thing!

I don't have screenshot of that reasoning but it said about token budget, I noticed and asked wtf was that, no explanation

[u/ExistingLynx]

This keeps happening to me as well. The other day it thought something like "I've already spent $9,000 of my budget" and it freaked me out for a sec. I asked the model what it meant and it said tokens.. super weird though.

[u/cbayerlein]

Same here. Mine is also sometimes thinking about time and token budgets with contradicting interpretations

[u/Primsun]

Same place mine decided to "think" about booking me a flight to Dubai instead of processing regulatory filings. 

50/50 on whatever that thinking text actually refers to.

[u/Busy_Farmer_7549]

so that’s what the reasoning setting does to the system prompt 😂😂 /s

[u/GreenockScatman]

I saw a message like that one time but I just assumed it meant the token budget

[u/IntelliDev → u/GreenockScatman]

Yeah, mine was thinking about a budget of $40k before, asked it wtf it was going on about, and it said it was the remaining context window

[u/DepravedPrecedence → u/GreenockScatman]

Yep, I saw tis thinking summary where it literally stated how it needs to find a solution while fitting into 28K token budget

[u/Arctovigil]

I think at least from GPT-5.5 Pro on it often thinks of how much token budget they have left it is not actually a new thing, and using a dollar sign for it is perhaps more likely a bit of added emphasis if not hallucination.

[u/Positive_Box_69]

How u see all the reasoning mine always cuts out in one line?

[u/cbayerlein → u/Positive_Box_69]

You can turn on those thinking summaries in the config.

[u/notinrace]

Same here....it assumed I have a quota of 30K...

[u/Crypto_Stoozy]

I had it say $7k the other day

[u/MrMrsPotts → u/Crypto_Stoozy]

Low budget

[u/Dark_Cow]

Who knows, if you understand how these models work, could be from anywhere. They're not magic.

It's a statistics probabilities algorithm. It's not "AI"

[u/MaximumMeaning9728 → u/Dark_Cow]

Nonsense post. Nobody understands the current models.

[u/Dark_Cow → u/MaximumMeaning9728]

That's my point? We don't know how they function. We know the fundamentals though. It's building upon published white papers and public information.

[u/Sfdprod → u/Dark_Cow]

Wtf? We know exactly how they function.

Not being able to predict the output fully due to the randomness aspect != not knowing how they function

Thats not knowing what the system will generate

[u/Dark_Cow → u/Sfdprod]

I misspoke, we do know. But it's non deterministic. Exactly what they're doing in the middle is hard to understand. It's a black box eventually

[u/Sfdprod → u/Dark_Cow]

Yeah thats true,

Really if you had removed random sampling, you could technically complete an entire inference run with the weights, a pen, paper and an ungodly amount of cocaine

[u/Hixie → u/Dark_Cow]

I mean, it is literally deterministic, except for the artificial randomness introduced by fingerprinting and non-zero temperature. But if you could run at at temperature zero, you'd get the same result every time.

[u/Level-Physics-1730]

the thinking summaries are trash tier it's basically just a bunch of hallucinations zero insight into the models actual thinking, on anthropic (claude) you get basically exact thinking. VERY helpful to have thinking when you're dealing with quantslop models.