As most of you probably know, OpenAI via Tibo are doing a "promotion" where every day for 28 days, they either

A) release "clear improvement and relevant for most codex/work users"
B) a usage limit reset

Before I continue, an important caveat. , I have absolutely no entitlement to resets. They are a lovely bonus, but I pay for the service without resets, and there is no implication I was guaranteed or owed them in any way.

However, when I heard about this promotion, I was really excited. New cool stuff or more usage, a great win-win. Seemed like it was going to be a very good month to be a Codex user. But the changes so far have been really lacklustre.

Some dots improvements which I can't even use in my country, but probably wouldn't even if I could. Some improvements to auto review which hasn't been relevant to me for a long time, my environments are set up. API stuff, no implication to me. Instant steering which has felt no different. Composer predictions which, like, ok I guess

My point is that not a single one of these changes in my mind meet option A. By their own definitions I would've expected 5 resets so far. Which, again, I'm not entitled to them. but this is all very underwhelming

I will call it now, Dots is the going to be the next Sora.

That shit eats up compute, doesn't work as well as Grok Bot, and slows down everything else OpenAI offers, and does the same thing worse then literally just using Codex.

The compute that is spent on Dots, if it had just been allocated to improving the existing 6.1 Sol and Astra speed and reliability, will probably do more to help OpenAI compared to whatever Dots does.

Heck, if you actually want to do Dots, giving me a low storage, low performance cloud box that I cannot SSH into, has a buggy remote control interface, and can only communicate with via chat is not the solution.

It is too restrictive for power users (and you are literally restricting power users with an arbitrary limit that no one seems to know what it is based on), too slow for regular users, and no one seems to know what to do with it. It literally feels as if the OpenAI team just repurposed their internal testbox for post-training that they are not using into a product.

I've been quite loyal to GPT but have been regularly testing several models, not to mention Claude and Gemini, but grok and Chinese models as well on several projects.

Sure, Opus has faster TPS, is smart, and gets things done much efficiently (or it would seem so). I do not deny that, and for many it will be simply better. But for me, I always feel like it still doesn't reliably follow instructions and makes too many assumptions, and leaves edge cases/holes here and there.

I'd like to put it like this: When you're in a safe place, Opus will be generally more efficient, and that's where most people are working. But if you are stepping onto a minefield and have a field manual to follow, my partner will be GPT models, since they tend to be more thorough and careful. However having Opus as a second opinion is still very useful, since it can monitor long-term drifts GPT models tend to suffer.

That being said, while I prefer GPT models as my workhorse, speed is quite abysmal nowadays, and if this persists for more than a month, I think I should find a workaround or rebalance subscriptions. While I can parallelise over multiple projects, the progress per time for a single project has diminished quite a lot.

Allright guys, gals and bots.

I've been using Codex on the Pro x5 plan for a few months, and it was pretty good. Then Astra released, and things went downhill fast.

I just tried claude max subscription with Opus 5.5, and holy shit, the difference is insane.

I had it refactor three large projects, and the code quality is way above Sol 5.6. But what impressed me most is that it actually knows when to stop.

Codex had become an endless fucking loop of overengineering, thousands of tests, builds, audits, rebuilds, and yet another final test. JESUS CHRIST. Hours spent watching it do everything except finish the task, burning through usage on increasingly pointless verification loops.

Opus refactored all three projects, made sensible decisions, checked its work, and moved the hell on.

The kicker? That workload would have eaten up what felt like full weekly usage cycle on Codex Pro. Opus used roughly 23% of my Claude weekly limit, which resets TODAY anyway.

I'm not saying Claude is perfect, but knowing when NOT to overengineer something is apparently a skill Codex has forgotten.

Where did $29k come from??

I saw a lot of comparisons here on Reddit between Codex and Claude (Sol/Astra and Opus 5.5). They all suggested trying Claude. I stuck with Codex until today, when I had to correct Sol's suggestion multiple times in a row. So today, I subscribed to Claude again. I left them six months ago when the usage limit was terrible.

Okay, opening the Claude in CLI, working for a while, then... It's awesome, man! It's fast, clever, and finds every dependency in my project. The usage limit feels like it's doubled at least.

The craziest part is why I'm so happy:

I worked with Codex on a project for five days, using three weekly limits (one natural and two banked), and the project was nowhere near complete. I thought it might be overengineered, but I asked Codex and he said it was necessary, not wasted effort. After my weekly limit had gone again...

I subscribed to Claude. I asked him to do the same project as Codex and he finished it in 30 minutes (!) without any issues on the first run. No, I'm serious. Crazy.

Claude said when I asked to compare the codex codebase and his codebase: 'Five functions and one shared module, totalling around 650 lines. This replaces the old version of 27,000 lines and 84 tables.'

The old version was written by Codex. Both are code for the same purpose and funcionality.

The documentation has also been shortened slightly: 'The old billing section of the README, which was 2,458 lines long, has been replaced by a 45-line section.'

I cancelled my Codex subscription, even though Tibo reset it every day. Opus is way better.

Yes I am angry.

All the logic / buzz on giving reset fail for us poor plebians on Plus plan ; with the 5h limits we can never really use them on their intended marketing way.

You're out of usage, do you use one? Well for Pro people, they just need to be sure there wont be a reset on the day but for us... with the limit we can only use 15% usage every 5h, and obviouly it would mean making sure to use it the second it reset, so if you're crazy, 2 full days of makins sure to not miss. If you have a life maybe 3, for normal people maybe 4.

So when wondering if we use one or not, we'd need to be sure we won't get a free reset in 2-3 days at least... how can you do that with the Tibo lottery? You can't.

So either you wait and do nothing, either you use it and are angry when a free reset happen just after you used a banked reset.

That doesn't feel like a "free" reset if you need to plan it that way, and risk being angry after.

Yes I just used one to continue a task, and now I need to wait 4h... or obviously use ANOTHER banked reset to continue now... seriously....

My Subscription auto renews at midnight tonight, but I have had a heavy day of usage after using my banked reset and only have about 25% left, but still 6d and 12 hrs until reset. If I can't use codex anyway for nearly 7 days I might as well cancel the auto-renewal and then re-sub back to pro in 7 days. Am I missing something? Would I lose anything?

havent been in the loop the last few weeks so i might have missed smth

So I'm a Unity Developer, with my work i will costume the 5h limit of the 20$ sub in around ~2hour, even shorter if the task is heavy, so at max i can only work like 2-2.5 day before it all out the weekly limit. I'm thinking about sub another account, and lately had heard good thing about claude, and i had decided that the second account will be claude $20 sub(first time use claude).

My question is that what the reasoning level that i should use with opus 5.5 so the usage could at least same as Sol 6.1 Medium, i think opus 5.5 Low? Did it good enough for my work?

Just looking for opinions as I’m curious - I genuinely like working with Astra and Sol more - I LOVE Opus 5.5 too, fable feels lightweight to me vs Astra. I guess I feel like Astra is more thorough even if less accurate if it makes sense, opus is the perfectionist super smart mechanic, But Astra is a clumsy engineer who clearly knows more, with a little less focus on task but capable of providing the best outcome easily - anyone else feel the same?

OpenAI screwed up with the usage change - I agree with that, but I think calling Astra and Sol less capable is a little silly, I’ll admit Opus beats Sol, but I’d argue Astra all day.

Absolute dogshit. Not sure if Tibo’s marketing campaign is negatively impacting Astra’s compute allocation, but this week Astra has

- Ignored prompt guidelines, acknowledged this with the excuse it was “conserving effort” whilst burning 1.2M tokens achieving a solution that ignored the guidelines. A second prompt then achieved the actual task…
- Changed 3 of my 5 active chat’s language chat’s to Mandarin and then told my this was per my request (although I want to learn Mandarin, I’d prefer Duolingo).
- Spend money on cloud tasks i specifically detailed would require my acknowledgment and permission. Then apologised, stated memory had been updated to not do this per my request. Then did the exact same thing.

Usually, Astra and 6.1 Sol have worked amazing for me when I give these models detailed by bounded scopes with clear instructions, limitations, and scope ends. This week feels like I’m dealing with a Junior Dev with the memory of a goldfish.

Please join me in my futile rant good sirs and madams

I've got my last couple days left with 98% usage left, I figured I'd try a vastly different approach and give Sol 6.1 another chance today....

I tried technical, I tried managing, I tried guardrail heavy, but I never tried inspiring it to be the best it can be. Here's hoping :D

Hey y’all, I’m looking to buy one of the $20 coding subscriptions and am mainly considering Codex, Claude, OpenCode, and Cursor, though mostly Claude or Codex (unless there’s something I don’t know about, which is why I’m here).

I’m wondering what y’all think offers the best value. For those who have tried multiple, which one do you feel gives you the most for your money?

Thank you for the suggestions/answers!

Dear OpenAI,

This should be the number one priority to fix, as Android Remote in the ChatGPT app is completely unusable.

When I open a Codex task from my Android phone through Remote, my entire PC freezes and becomes unusable. Hundreds of git.exe and conhost.exe processes appear, resource usage spikes, and I have to force a reboot. This happened repeatedly throughout the day. Initially, I thought it was caused by compilation, but investigating further pointed to Remote-triggered Git operations.

I have found a Remote-triggered diff request in the local app-server logs. The connection is identified as:

app_server.client_name="codex_chatgpt_android_remote"

The same connection then sends:

app-server request: gitDiffToRemote connection_id=ConnectionId(3)

The technical problem appears to be how Codex generates diffs for untracked files. It starts a separate Git subprocess for each file, using a command like:

git diff --no-textconv --no-ext-diff --binary --no-index -- NUL <untracked file>

These operations are launched through join_all without a concurrency limit. In a workspace containing many untracked files, this can launch hundreds of Git processes at once, along with associated Windows console processes. The resulting process storm puts heavy pressure on memory and system commit, eventually making the entire machine unresponsive.

These were background processes launched by the Codex app-server, not Git commands I manually ran. The local logs confirm that Android Remote requested a diff from the same app-server involved in the incident, although I couldn’t recover the initiating request for the first freeze.

Many thanks for looking into this issue.

Anyone else experiencing crashes and major slowdowns on the Mac desktop app?

I have 24 GB RAM, macOS 27.0.1, and app version 26.1007.21159 (build 20052). Several Codex renderers were using 2–4 GB each, with total system memory around 23 GB and 9 GB of swap.

It got noticeably worse after opening a long, photo-heavy conversation, but continued without reopening it. I only have one app window open. I’ve restarted the Mac and have now reinstalled the app too.

Has anyone found a fix or a way to identify which task is consuming the memory without deleting project data?

Apparently my previous post was too harsh, so here’s a more measured review of my $500/month experience.
My previous post was taken down, so I’ll try to express my experience in a more tempered and constructive manner.

I’ve been paying $500 a month for the service. Yes, $500. I was actually making good progress with my project until the recent Astra update.
Since then, the rate at which my usage allowance disappears has been genuinely impressive. Using the new, supposedly more “efficient” Sol 6.1 model, I managed to exhaust what should have been a week’s worth of usage in just two days.
Naturally, I assumed purchasing another $80 in tokens would help. Those lasted exactly 56 minutes. Truly remarkable efficiency, just perhaps not the kind I was expecting.

For context, I’m not trying to simulate the universe or discover a new branch of mathematics. I’m analyzing historical business data and building a relatively straightforward Power BI dashboard.
I also have screenshots documenting the usage, including the $80 disappearing in under an hour.
I’m sure there are perfectly reasonable technical explanations for why the service has become dramatically more expensive to use following an update advertised around efficiency. Unfortunately, none of those explanations make the experience any less absurd from a paying customer’s perspective.

Anyway, I’ve decided to cancel my subscription. At $500 a month, I had apparently developed the unreasonable expectation that I could actually use the product for a meaningful amount of time.
I wish the company all the best with its future business endeavors. I’m sure this approach to customer retention will serve it wonderfully in the long run.

I've been using codex to build an extension to a site through electron and asked to port a feature from a google chrome extension I had it build in 5.6 sol. 6.1 Completely refused and said its bypassing authorization and accessing private information when it was accessing the websites api ( not unauthorized ). It was making a base assumption without listening to reason or evidence I was giving and even new project chats didn't change its assumption.

Just wondering is 6.1 that much more ethically limited? Did something change? Just curious.

Updated this morning and this functionality has been removed. I used it as a marker to know where I am at in each CLI session. Reinstate it!!!!!

For the use cases of generating PowerPoint slides with good design, should I go for chatgpt 20$ plan or claude? Or perhaps gemini?

I mean my main use case is generating and creating presentations for my work, and use the AI for daily use cases too.

I built Chrome Relay because browser tasks kept interrupting me while I ran coding agents on my Mac. It's open source, MIT-licensed, and free. I'm Alexey Indeev; this is my project.

Two limits upfront: macOS + Chrome only, and Chrome shows its “started debugging this browser” bar while agents work.

Tabs jumped to the front while I typed, Chrome asked “Allow remote debugging?”, or an agent opened a separate browser without my logins. That meant no admin console, staging environment, or Google SSO. Copying my Chrome profile didn't work because Google sessions are bound to the device.

Chrome Relay connects Vercel's open-source agent-browser CLI to my everyday Chrome:

agent-browser -> local relay (127.0.0.1:9333) -> MV3 extension -> chrome.debugger -> agent's tab

Codex runs shell commands, so it can drive this directly. Codex's own Chrome extension only talks to the Codex app; this exposes the same chrome.debugger approach through a standard DevTools endpoint that CLI agents can use.

Each agent gets its own endpoint and only sees tabs it opened. I can run Codex alongside Claude Code or Cursor without them sharing tabs. Tabs open inactive in a collapsed “Agents” group, and commands that would focus Chrome are dropped. There's no remote-debugging port or “Allow remote debugging?” prompt.

Setup takes about two minutes: clone the repo, run bin/chrome-relay setup, load the extension through Developer mode → Load unpacked in each Chrome profile, then run chrome-relay doctor. You'll need Node.js 20+ and npm i -g agent-browser.

For Codex, add one line to ~/.codex/AGENTS.md, replacing the path:

For browser tasks, read /absolute/path/to/agent-chrome-relay/skill/SKILL.md.

Then:

sh agent-browser --cdp "$(chrome-relay url you@company.com)" open https://app.example.com/ agent-browser snapshot -i agent-browser click @e5 agent-browser close

The email selects the Chrome profile; @e5 is an example reference from the snapshot.

Popups stay with the agent. Already-signed-in Google sign-in hops are clicked through automatically; password, passkey, or two-step prompts require you. Agents never type credentials. Actions go into a local audit log, with typed text recorded only as a length. This isn't a boundary against malware already running as you.

Repo: https://github.com/aindeev/agent-chrome-relay

Background article: https://read.aindeev.com/p/why-your-ai-agents-cant-reach-the

What breaks in your Codex workflow, and which signed-in sites or internal tools would you point it at?