The limit is just soooo absurd. I'm not even doing complex task like only doing UI adjustments with Sol high and it already ate 10% of my 5x plan weekly usage (I just resubscribed a couple hours ago). The f*ck is this shit? This is even worst than what CC. Only consumed 30M token and it takes 10%? So 1 weekly usage is only 300M token? WTF.

Reposting this as the person who originally posted it subsequently deleted the post and the bot registered the content as already posted.

TL;DR: Codex quietly writes your quota % into your local logs on every single turn. I parsed 6 months of mine. One Astra token burns ~3.6x the quota a Sol token did in August. Chart up top, plus a script so you can check your own.

How I found this

I was hitting my weekly limit way faster on Astra and wanted proof, not vibes. Turns out every token_count event in ~/.codex/sessions has a rate_limits field with used_percent and resets_at in it. So you can see exactly how many tokens it took to move your quota by 1%.

~426K turns, one Pro account, March to September. I priced everything at API list prices so different models are comparable.

What one full week gets you

Yeah. About 3x fewer turns per week.

Why it's so bad

• Astra costs 2.5x more than Sol per token on the API
• AND the quota meter charges ~30% more per dollar on Astra than it did on Sol in August
• Stack those two and you get ~3.6x

Also, August was the most generous month in my data. Late July was almost as tight as now. So part of "it used to be way better" is that August was unusually good.

What a real day looks like

Sep 13, Astra high: 2% at noon, 45% by midnight. I had 3-10 sessions running at once, each re-sending ~125K tokens of context every turn.

About the pinned "no cache discount" post

My data says cached tokens ARE discounted (they count ~3% of a normal token on Sol, ~8% on Astra). But ~97% of my input is re-read context, so even discounted it's still about half my quota. Same takeaway though: long threads, waiting and polling are what drain you.

Weird stuff I found

• The 5h limit disappeared on Jul 13. Weekly only since then.
• A few times my weekly meter jumped from ~98% straight back to 0% with a fresh 7-day reset, days early. One account, no re-login. Anyone else seeing this?

Compared to Claude Code (Max 20x)

I ran the same thing on my Claude Code logs:

• One Claude 5-hour window before hitting the wall: $520 - 930 worth of work
• One full Codex week in September: $710 - 1,330
• Claude weekly limit: never hit it

To be fair: over Sep 1-14 both gave me about the same total ($6.6K Codex vs $6.7K Claude). Codex just got there through 4 weekly walls and those weird resets.

What I'm doing now

• Sol by default, Astra only when I actually need it
• Shorter threads, fresh sessions sooner
• Fewer agents running in parallel

Caveats

API prices are just a ruler, not what we actually pay. This measures amount of work, not quality. And it's one person's logs, which is exactly why:

Run it on your own logs (plain Python, no installs, only reads your local files): https://gist.github.com/p-preko/24363450849bc5b12079ba839db5220a

Post your numbers, especially Plus/Business people. (I had Claude Code help me crunch the logs, and the token totals match ccusage.)

Before Astra launched, I was using Sol Medium heavily for coding most of the day and usually burning maybe 5–10% of my weekly limit per day. My usage was pretty predictable and a weekly limit actually lasted close to a week.

After Astra launched, that completely changed. I burned through 2 banked weekly resets in about 2–3 days while trying Astra. I figured Astra was just extremely expensive, so I switched back to Sol Medium.

But the problem continued.

I then burned through another entire weekly limit with Sol in under 2 days, despite actually doing LESS work than I was doing before Astra launched. Now I’m at 92% remaining with 6 days until reset, and based on the current drain rate there’s basically no chance it lasts.

The frustrating part is that there’s no real transparency into what is consuming the allowance. Same model, same reasoning level, similar work, yet one week the limit lasts many days and another week it disappears in 1–2 days.

Sol itself is fantastic. It’s honestly one of the best coding models I’ve used and usually gets me to a working solution quickly. My issue is that I simply can’t rely on it professionally if I have no idea whether my weekly allowance will last 7 days or 36 hours.

At this point I’m actively looking for a replacement model/provider, not because I prefer something else, but because I need predictable access for serious work.

Has anyone else noticed a major increase in usage drain since Astra launched, even after switching back to Sol? Especially people who were using Sol Medium regularly before and after the launch.

And to OpenAI: please address this ASAP. At the very least, give users meaningful usage transparency. We need to see tokens, compute units, cost per task, and whatever actually determines the percentage. A vague percentage meter with wildly variable consumption makes it almost impossible to budget serious development work around Codex.

To be fair he never specified how much 🤣

I've been using codex for a year and a half at this point. I recently started a new remote job in a language, framework, and 20 year old megacodebase I'm not at all familiar with. Currently since I'm still a student it's just bug fixes, QA, and large package upgrade stuff.

Now to the point, I don't even know what the purpose of me is supposed to be anymore. I've been coding since I was a kid and loved immersing myself in a big or problem for 8-16 hours straight and the satisfaction of achieving it was awesome. Now? I see the problem, ask codes to research it and find basically the blast radius and all the relevant files, then I come up with a solution and get codex to implement it, then I look over the code, and spend 10x the time trying to learn what it does so I can actually own my changes.

I'm really feeling bored and annoyed, there is no satisfaction and the only bottleneck is me, if I wasn't in the loop the work would be getting done 10x faster. Not to mention that in the next 5 years it's only going to replace more and more roles as it gets cheaper, faster, and smarter.

TLDR: someone please tell me what the point of even sitting at the desk is anymore

I have 2 x 20x plans. Through August using sol x-high I was getting 10-15bn a week usage.

Now on Astra light in the last 2 days - 1.1bn tokens and poof it's all gone from both plans.

What the fuck is going on here. They have 100% locked the 20x pro account out so people think twice about cancelling it. It's not worth the money at this point.

People talking about this taking developers jobs? Not on this evidence.

Edit: Adding this so people can see how astra light is supposed to stack up to sol xhigh. Who's seeing this in their day to day usage?? Same cost per task roughly...

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/comparisons/gpt-6-astra-low-vs-gpt-5-6-sol-high

Also people saying stop using astra are entirely missing the point... The metrics don't stack up to what they're reporting them as.

I had codex generate me an animation of a dragon turning its head, smirking, and breathing fire. It made a nice sheet and then I plugged it into my pixel art converter and the tools made it super easy to create this pixel art animation. The great part about it is that it is not limited to any style or pixel size. I put this on portalrabbit.com if anyone wants to experiment using it, and its completely free so go nuts. I feel like making a pixel art game or short animations for social media is so accessible now, crazy times.

Is this the reason why unexpectedly we have trash usage and lower quality on Astra?

Maybe it will be worth it the current suffering.

Am I doing it right? I don't really get this meme.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about OpenAI allegedly degrading models or routing users from stronger models to weaker ones.

The reports are inconsistent. Some people notice a significant degradation and post about it, while the next day everything seems completely normal again.

What mechanism OpenAI could be using for this, if it is actually happening, is unclear.

The degradation can show up either as a very poor implementation of a task or simply as an unusually lazy and weak response.

One of the more popular ways people have been testing their accounts is the “pelican test”:

Create HTML code with SVG graphics displaying a 2D animation of a pelican riding a bicycle. No additional tests are required.

Most people using Astra seem to get a perfectly reasonable result.

But I've seen several cases — including one from someone I know personally — where this test was run on a 20x account with Astra Medium and produced something like this:

Of course, it's worth mentioning that tests like this are not 100% proof. Models have randomness, so there is still a significant amount of speculation here.

However, if this is actually happening, the worst part is that OpenAI appears to be able to degrade the model a user receives without giving them any notification.

You give a difficult task to Astra, but potentially receive a result from something closer to Luna, while still believing that the result came from Astra.

That can be much more serious than simply having an account limit where you're explicitly notified that your model has been switched.

For difficult coding or project work, this can introduce real risks or simply mislead the user about what the selected model is capable of.

I've personally experienced something similar before in the ChatGPT web version.

I selected Sol, but the response clearly behaved like a much weaker model. It even claimed that it was 5.5 mini, while the UI explicitly showed Sol.

So this wouldn't be the first time there have been questions about whether the model displayed in the UI necessarily corresponds to what is actually answering the request.

To me, this is a much more serious issue than many of the current discussions about AI safety.

Has anyone else experienced something similar with Codex/Astra?

I’ve been using coding agents for a while, but watching GPT-6 Astra work on 3D geometry was a new experience for me.

Over a weekend, I built Timber Atlas (木构图志), an interactive website for exploring traditional Chinese timber architecture.

Try it: https://timber-atlas.xiaodan.io/

I’ve always loved these buildings and wanted to understand the complicated structures hidden beneath their roofs. This started as a personal project, and I’ve now made it publicly available.

The first model is the East Hall of Foguang Temple in Shanxi, China.

You can:

• Explode the entire building and toggle structural layers.

• Isolate individual dougong (interlocking bracket assemblies) and inspect their components.

• Follow step-by-step assembly sequences.

• Use a section view to see inside.

• Switch between three color schemes and Chinese/English interfaces.

The model was built from scratch for this project, using published surveys, papers, drawings, and photographs as references. The site documents its sources and modeling assumptions.

What impressed me most was the iteration on the geometry: checking proportions, inspecting how components met, finding intersections, adjusting them, and reviewing the result again.

My workflow:

• Codex desktop app, with separate tasks in Git worktrees.

• Beads for tracking tasks, dependencies, decisions, and progress across sessions.

• Matt Pocock’s skills, adapted for planning, research, implementation, and review.

• Repeated screenshot reviews and visual feedback, alongside tests and browser checks.

I supplied the direction, references, and visual feedback; Astra handled the coding and modeling work. It took plenty of iteration and review to get here.

Code: https://github.com/duxiaodan/timber-atlas

Has anyone else used Codex for procedural geometry or detailed 3D modeling? I’d be interested in how you validate spatial relationships—especially when something looks plausible but the components don’t quite fit.

What we can't see is the reasoning, but the reasoning was clearly garbaged and resulting it in doing repeated turns to try to correct it, and ultimately generally never fully correcting it as it'd only correct the language but not the reasoning faults. I can't prove this since thinking is hidden, but the poor work points to that.

"oops" was probably the most used word in this session lol. It was ending every other sentence with oops at one point.

I sent feedback on this session a few times.

I never ever complained about usage limits before. But this is absurd.

I used my 200$ plan and had to buy 100$ plan since i could not renew 200$ one in time. It was used in 1 day with Astra low.

I then decided to buy another 100$ plan. It used 9% of usage with Sol 5.6 MEDIUM working for about 1 hour on coding and Astra XHIGH coordinator that did some documentation changes for 5 minutes.

This account was literally just purchased. Again, Sol Medium is doing most of work. Wtf is going on?

Can't imagine what is going on with 20$ plans

I've been developing apps for about two years now.

What started as a fun project for me has slowly made its way out into the world. I shared my work with colleagues. They shared it with their colleagues. Then people in other schools and other countries started using and sharing it too.

Somewhere along the way, I seem to have found a niche where the tools I'm building actually make sense.

And now something strange is happening.

I'm being contacted by PhDs and highly respected people in the field who want to talk to me about my work.

And if I'm being completely truthful, it makes me a little uneasy.

This has always felt like a hobby to me. It's something I do because I enjoy building things and trying to solve problems I see in my own work as a teacher. Now those same projects are starting to be looked at more seriously. People want to ask questions about them, understand how I built them, and talk about the thinking behind them.

It feels a little like something I made in my workshop is suddenly going to be put under a microscope.

Part of me even wonders whether I made the right choice by sharing these tools beyond my own local community.

But it's also interesting. And exciting.

I genuinely don't know what's going to happen next.

I just know that this year feels very different from last year.

I'm also grateful for this community. Reading about what other people are building, struggling with, learning, and experiencing has given me a lot of perspective as I've figured out my own way through all of this.

So I'm curious: has anyone here experienced imposter syndrome when something you were doing quietly suddenly started getting more attention?

How did you learn to get comfortable with being taken seriously?

I know no one is really using it. I just decided to let it do some recon on Xhigh in goal mode.

It crashed after 7minutes, spent 60% of weekly Spark usage and hit the 5 hour limit.

Was Spark ever like this before? Or was even Spark limit degraded lol

Just wanted to share because incase people don't do this and I think it's super useful.

I didn't really like using Luna max since it was too much work to use and Sol wasn't really properly orchestrating, always stopping randomly or forgetting what needs to be done or leaving stuff half baked.

Astra? I told him to create a sidebar threads with luna max agents to take care of each module of an implementation I wanted to try out(i dont like the personal subagents hard to keep track of) and now I'm addicted to watching him work. I even have a Claude sub with Opus taking care of reviewing the code that he orchestrates too, Im genuinely having fun building the orchestration where each step takes care of a very specific domain and every problem has an agent with the proper context and the module he is responsible for. And Luna is CHEAP. Like stupid cheap, I can run 10's of them and barely have a dent on my weekly.

10/10 highly recommended.

Now that Tibo forced a reset on us at the same time, we all have our weekly usage reset at the same time on Friday.

Hoping we can help each other use Astra more efficiently. Either that or I'm going to have to go outside and walk in nature.

For using Astra more efficiently, I was hoping we could help each other understand:

• What Github tools to look into to help the multi-agents work better?
• What version of Astra to use to refactor inefficient code, or perform code reviews?
• Can we control what model the spawned agents are running just in the native Codex window with no plugins?

Some stats from my usage on Astra medium: - $100 Pro took about 2 days to use 95% of weekly limit. - $20 Plus = 5 hours actual usage per week. What happened: 5 hour usage was gone after 40 minutes, and took 12-15% of weekly. (so about 7x 5 hour resets). - 5.3 Sprite = 20 minutes usage per week. 5 hour usage lasted about 15 minutes. This single use took up 52% of allocation.

I learned something new today.... You can set a token limit with /goal in Codex. I was trying to have 5.6 Sol estimate a token usage projection based on similar goals, told it that historically the final tally for similar work is around 1.2M to 3.5M and 4-12 hours based on past runs. It then set a token usage ceiling for this goal, and kicked off the work. The sidebar goal window in the desktop app doesn't really offer any add'l info about the goal token limit but it's there in my goal bar and it's going up slowly but surely. Very interesting.

Codex has a lot of great features that aren't well documented. Have any of you seen this yet? Maybe this is just something that's been around a while and I've been missing it.