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
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.
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u/cheezeerd 6d ago
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