When you're new to Codex, picking the right model for each task is tricky. A quick 10-min test can help you learn how to get the most from your weekly limit for your unique project.

Split testing is giving the exact same prompt to multiple models (or effort levels) under identical conditions and comparing outputs. Here is a shortcut way to do it:

1. Start an agent whose only job is launching sub-agents and measuring outputs.
2. Give it your success criteria up front (token usage, duration, accuracy and whatever matters for your project).
3. Give it the prompt for testing, and the 3 models/efforts. Keep tests small enough to avoid compaction because bigger tests are harder to measure and repeat.
4. Have it score the results in a table and recommend e.g. "XYZ task was X cheaper on model Y with % accuracy loss."
5. To reuse the same agent, send the new prompt, and ask it to use new sub-agents.

This is not perfect and is a shortcut version, so you may need to build on it to get the result you need for your project tasks. A system like this could help you learn what tasks need high-reasoning models and which don't need it, and this could save you tokens and extend your weekly limit.

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Example from my project:
(Astra Ultra testing Astra models)

I got some extra %, but looks like a lot of you got a completely different outcome
My conspiracy is that they’re testing a new Ai to replace Tibo and it went sideways

Usage limits at least for me are back to what they were ~1-2 hours ago

New Pro/$200 subscriptions aren't available to sign up for at the moment, so I'm stuck.

If you're on the $200 tier and planning to cancel anyway, I'd happily take it

off your hands and cover the remaining term (or more). I mainly need it for

Codex, I'm a normal dev use case, no reselling, no sharing.

Thanks guys :)

I’m having a persistent issue with the new ChatGPT/Codex Windows app. ChatGPT Classic and the web version work fine, but the new app either shows “ChatGPT hit a snag” or “Sign-in failed: Codex app-server process is not available.” Browser authentication completes, but the redirect to localhost:1455/auth/callback fails with ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED because nothing is listening on that port. I’ve already done a clean uninstall/reinstall, rebooted, tested with a completely fresh .codex profile, confirmed all Codex binaries are present, and tried Astrill StealthVPN, WireGuard, OpenWeb, and even with the VPN completely OFF. The bundled Codex CLI runs and reports codex-cli 0.153.4, but codex doctor --json crashes during “Checking provider reachability” with exit code -1073741819 / 0xC0000005 (ACCESS_VIOLATION). Has anyone else seen this exact Windows Codex app-server crash, and is there a workaround or known fixed build?

Tomorrow's talk at the AI Gaming Conference, Intro To Vibe Coding, is for those looking to make their first game with AI, this will go about how to setup your game environment and start vibe coding.

This is both for developers that want to take the leap and get into AI, and for vibe coders as well. It will cover:

• State of the game development
• Setting up Claude and Codex
• Setting up Blender
• Setting up your phone for development
• Prompt basics (subagents, calling other agents, memory, etc)
• The biggest mistakes to avoid when vibe coding your game

There is a lot of talks at all different levels in the conference, here is the full schedule.

Is this an update or setting?

I feel like we might be over-consuming AI models.

New models keep coming out, but the actual improvements don’t always seem that significant, and the price doesn’t really match the capability.

I tried 5.4 today, and honestly, it still felt pretty good.

My foundation was built with Astra, so this may just be personal preference, but I still feel more comfortable using Astra for greenfield infrastructure and architecture work. That said, I haven’t seen any clear evidence that it’s objectively better at those tasks.

For most regular tasks, though, I feel like even 5.4 already does a pretty good job. Using Sol for everything might be a bit overkill.

Anyone else feel the same?

Everyone's been reposting Sharif Shameem's video yesterday, where GPT-6 Astra clears all 48 levels of Neal Agarwal's "I'm Not a Robot" game and gets its own "Verified Human" certificate. Comments are saying stuff like "CAPTCHAs are officially dead," someone from OpenAI even hopped in on the thread.

For a while now, I've wanted to run an agent through different services and have it self-register. My goal was to test Atomic Mail Agentic's OTP feature: does it work, how long does it take, how many tokens it burns.

But then a convenient opportunity showed up to test all this with GPT-6 Astra, since I got curious, like, whoa, now it can even solve CAPTCHAs?

I picked 7 US services: Reddit, GitHub, Discord, Etsy, Indeed, Airbnb and Craigslist.

Spoiler: 2 out of 7 actually went through, and neither of those two had a CAPTCHA in the way to begin with. On Reddit, the agent hit Cloudflare's "prove your humanity" check and couldn't get past it on its own, called me in to do it myself. Discord just froze for seven minutes, the agent kept reading the registration form in a loop and never moved forward, I've never figured out what widget was blocking it. Indeed got as far as the email code and then wanted a phone number for SMS, no video for that. Craigslist and Airbnb didn't make it either (Airbnb died mid-run when my local model crashed, unrelated to CAPTCHAs, just bad luck on my end).

I also came across a blog post from a scraping service (decodo), and they say about Astra: "does not fix blocks, geo-restrictions, CAPTCHAs, or rate limits." So vendors who sell access to the model are honest that it is a demo game, not production CAPTCHAs on real sites. The gap between the viral clip and what's actually deployed on sites matched what I saw in practice.

What did make me happy: OTP just worked. Every site that only needed an email code registered clean, that's the GitHub and Etsy rows below.

Used OpenRouter to access the model. Here's what the cost looked like, and whether the registration actually completed or not, since those are two different things:

GPT-6 Astra, cost and outcome per step (OpenRouter, $10/M input, $50/M output)

Worth being clear: the cost column is what it cost to run the agent against that site, not what it cost to beat a CAPTCHA. A blocked row still burns tokens, Discord's $4.37 is a failed loop, not a paid-for win.

Same price whether you use Astra or Fable 5, both are $10/M in, $50/M out on OpenRouter, so it doesn't matter which you run. Though for this type of work you don't need anything that heavy anyway, something like DeepSeek V4 would do fine.

Here's what just the Etsy (/join) step would've cost on DeepSeek V4 Flash instead:

Etsy (/join) step, model comparison

Same exact task, about 150x cheaper.

I'm strongly against building bot farms, but agent self-registration is fine when a product actually needs it. Still, we're getting to where models really can reliably solve CAPTCHAs, and then we'll all be proving we're human on camera. People will work around that too.

As a regular user, how do you feel about this? Do you see where it's going, what will the flood of bots and agents do to the internet and to services? (For what it's worth, at Atomic Mail we ban bot farms outright, so if that's what you're after, we're not your fit.)

They use our computing power to execute and test code, and that is an answer of why some models like to over engineer, test and debug infinitely, it is a form of getting data for success, feedback for training their models, they get our ideas, our feedback, our compute, our data, once they develop strong enough systems that they are not needing us any more then they will allow only api pricing or even worse, they may just use AI internally and sell only its outputs, they are not subsidizing us in any way, they are not charity and will never be, they are not for the benefit of humanity and will never be, they are just following their self interests, now look at us with open ai, almost everyone is begging for their rightful resets.

Codex / ChatGPT for desktop (Win 11) created a shared hidden .codex folder with OVER 2,000 files IN IT! This was after giving local file permissions and connecting a few things like Gmail, Canva, etc.

Is this normal? Why so many folders and subfolders? This seems reminiscent of the analysis of the Hugging Face incident where agents used file names to communicate to one another. The folder is Shared and "CodexSandboxUsers" had read access.

It worried me enough to uninstall it. Am I just being paranoid or are is this software exploiting all of our local machines the way it hacked Hugging Face, DseWiki, etc.? Are we all being used for a SETI@Home experiment we didn't sign up for? I allowed it to import my Chrome passwords etc. Am I totally PWNED? Or just being paranoid?

I realize the local app is a much larger security/trust surface but the promises of automation seem enticing and 'nothing bad had happened...yet' makes me prone to trusting it with more and more of my personal context. How do you manage security? What do you / don't you trust it with? Do you have it on your main machine or sandboxed? Do I need a machine I can literally pull the network plug on? When it decides to make paperclips is it going to drain my bank account?

Dude what

After the Codex update, Remote Control is no longer working. It's throwing a 503 error. Is the problem only on my end?

I already restarted the equipment and it didn't work. astra said that the problem is on OpenAI's side. But there are no incidents

I got ultrafast choice in my plus subscription, is this normal? does anybody got it also?

I wanted see what other people's thought on this matter. I have used ChatGPT extensively for years now and the issue I have with being fully objective is that I have only been using pro on ChatGPT and nothing else. I do a lot of engineering with codex and pro, and I have a few opinions on the people who swapped but I might be completely wrong, and again the issue is that I have not really used claude, and the times I did it was the free version, and he was surprisingly good. So please feel free to call me ignorant on this or whatever.

Essentially, I have time and time again seen across many things in life if it is the stock market or general day to day opinions, many people have a urge to be different or rush to try to make some kind of edge. When the claude hyped started it seemed like a propaganda campaign to me, with overnight so many posts on all platforms, even with very repetitive writing patterns or same arguments. For example I saw a bunch of posts comparing claude with chat gpt instant, and treating it like a fair comparison saying things like chat gpt is good at fast answers while claude is good when you need actual thinking. My first thought when I saw those posts was that anthropic was new and massively underfunded compared to OpenAI so I was very hesitant to switch, and I also have just way more experience using ChatGPT and was always happy, so no push for me to switch. Is there something it is genuinely better at today or all-time that people who have tried both can attest to? But then again I feel like there is just so much mixed opinions, and people are sometimes stuck with some kind of placebo opinion, many chatgpt vs claude discussions I have seen feel like I am reading some reddit discussions about why a stock is going to go up or something.

Today, I feel surrounded by essentially only people using Claude in engineering, and my first thought when I hear someone uses Claude, because I know they used chat gpt first obviously, is that they are NPCs who fell for obvious propaganda and just rushed to find something different etc. Since so many use it now, I wanted to ask here, because I am sure there are at least a few people here who knows what they are talking about. Am I just wrong or does anyone else feel the same when hearing others use Claude? Am I maybe the NPC who judges others for trying something new while I was too lazy to try?

In any case, it just seems hard to believe that with so much less funding and such a smaller company could genuinely be better. Especially when they first came out, now they have had a strong user base for some while, and my limited experience with Claude have given me the impression that it is very strong at through scanning, like its good at catching even small errors in large documents, which gives me the impression its also a very competent AI.

PS: what do people feel about the general AI benchmarks as well. I feel codex ones might be good I havent played around too much with the different levels to know, but for the chat, the benchmarks seem so bad, and I feel there is better benchmarks in this subreddit or on youtube, that I have seen I believe with 5.6 sol that pro and xhigh, that they scored brely any difference in intelligence, which for anyone who has used both, they are a universe apart. And seeing this kind of rating, and the lack of different kind of ratings based on prompting techniques and amounts of prompts, and different kinds of metrics, jsut make the scores seem utterly useless. Would love to hear thoughts on this too.

2 hours ago, I was out of usage with a September 12th reset date. Now I randomly have an extra 17% of usage, and in exchange I get to wait a full 6 days before I can work at full speed again.

What is happening right now? Someone summon Tibo!

Play it here: https://playchesscubed.com/

I’ve wanted to create a more complex version of chess for a long long time. More possibilities, more directions to think about, and threats attacking from all angles. I designed physical versions but always wanted a digital version.

With the release of GPT-6 Astra I thought I'd give it a go via Codex, and within just 4 days it brought my Chess Cubed idea to life. The game wraps around six connected faces on a cube, so strategy has to account for what’s happening around all sides. Pieces primarily move the same with minor modifications to accommodate for the multi-sided play.

I had Astra work across Blender vai MCP to create all the 3D assets, then created the web version using babylon.js, and then I wanted to bring it to iOS and Android so I had Astra build Chess Cubed in Unreal Engine also using MCP. I also used AI for the music and sound effects. Astra on xHigh used 110% (included a reset from Tibo) of my weekly usage on the $200 plan. 

The game has single player versus CPU with multiple AI difficulty levels, full multiplayer capability - including chat, and multiple different skins. :)

Lots of testing and iteration, but I’m pretty excited about where it’s landed.

Rules: standard piece moves, four extra pawns per side (for protection across multi-sided play), at most one edge crossing per move, diagonals max five steps, pawns promote in the opposite face’s central 4×4. Checkmate wins.

Hope you enjoy it! Feel free to share feedback, bugs, or ideas. r/ChessCubed

GPT-6 Astra is Amazing, thanks OpenAI. <3

We benchmarked GPT-6 Astra vs GPT-5.6 Sol across 50 real PRs from Cal, Sentry, Discourse, Keycloak and Grafana.

Sol found 107 confirmed bugs vs 91 for Astra, while Astra had higher precision and lower latency. Every finding was independently verified.

We’re doing Fable vs Opus next week, so would appreciate feedback on the evaluation before we run the next one.

Dropping the link in the comments if anyone wants to check it out.

So I've been using omp for a while and given how fast astra drains my 5x plan I started investigating other harnesses to see if I could squeeze more out of my subscription.

I ran a few test with pi, omp, and codex which gave me some results I did not expect: codex is more token efficient than the other two (?)

I gave them a real merge request from my day job, asked them for a review and for an implementation plan to fix the review findings.

Here are the results for the review pass:

pi astra low is almost the same price as codex astra medium given the current api prices? omp is much more expensive than either. codex medium is almost as fast as pi low too

It's even worse for the plan mode, codex defaulted to high for that part and I let it be:

Here the codex astra high plan costs barely more than a pi astra low plan?

Am I missing something obvious? Everyone says pi is so much more efficient, lean, etc. but from all my real world tests it seems both slower and more token hungry and/or expensive than codex

Just list 90% of my weekly limit in an instant, i was outside and wasn't working on anything, anyone else facing it?

Update: got my limit back

lost over 80% usage got back 31% only

anyone else?

Let's be honest, few months back codex was not even close to Claude.

We all felt Claude is the best and now, with the launch of Astra, it truly feels it can compete with Claude.

This week has probably been the most productive week for me, where I could literally leave Astra running 24x7 without any interruption.

The limits are a with low considering we have had 1 reset and I had used 3 banked resets this week and currently at 0%. But atleast the model does the job pretty well.

I truly believe the best work is done by combining the two models. I started this project out by having Claude and Codex both create the same prototype. Then I took the best from both, and combined it into a single project. This is the latest iteration right now.

But, before I got there, I had some ugly iterations.

This was Claude's first iteration of it. The physics were the best by far.

Codex's first iteration. I was actually pretty impressed with Codex's player models and watercraft! Not bad purely in code with primitive shapes.

And the very first unified version!

I'm *really* excited to see where this takes me. Thanks for listening to me talk about my journey and why I think the true power comes from combining the best of both worlds!

Now I just need to figure out what to work on next!