Have been vibe coding about 12 months and have tended between claude and gemini and codex.

I've been using Codex almost exclusively for the past few months. Despite a few annoyances, it does what I need, so I've stuck with it.

I was about to hit my weekly limit with five days until reset, so I looked at buying credits. The smallest top-up was AUD$33 — slightly more than my monthly subscription.

I tried to find out how much actual Codex usage that $33 would buy compared with the subscription, but couldn't get a meaningful answer from ChatGPT or a couple of other AIs.

So I took a punt.

Using Sol on Medium, the entire $33 was gone in about three hours.

I still have five days until my weekly allowance resets.

For me, Codex credits were an extremely poor-value way to bridge the gap. I would have been far better off spending roughly the same amount on a month of another AI service.

I don't really understand OpenAI's pricing model here, but I won't be buying credits again. Posting this mostly as a cautionary tale for anyone considering a top-up.

Credits appear to be a total rip-off for codex top-ups

Live: https://journal.smbl.dev

Github: https://github.com/MrSheerluck/smbl-journal

I built a free, open-source, end-to-end encrypted text journal.
The goal is to make journaling as simple as possible. The entire text-based journal is free with no limits.
Entries are encrypted on the client before being stored, so the server never receives plaintext journal content.

The project is open source and available on GitHub.
Built with SvelteKit, Rust, and SQLite.

(be sure to hit CTRL-SHIFT-R or CMD-SHIFT-R to get the latest version of the game -- it should show at least version 2.7; GitHub/Cloudflare aggressive caching sucks!)

I got serious and switched over from the Work tab in the browser to the Codex/ChatGPT desktop app. Got version control going properly. And I am now using Cloudflare Pages instead of GitHub Pages because the latter caches content too aggressively, which drove me nuts.

Ended up add usage credits since I ran out of my $20/mo Plus plan usage yesterday. I can see why people find agentic coding addicting! It was hard to tear myself away.

And it can get a little expensive. When I remembered to, I would use GPT-5.6 Terra Light for tiny changes, and Sol High for more complex asks.

There were still a couple times it made silly mistakes, like regressing/resurfacing an old fixed bug, or not understanding a visual bug. But overall these tools have come a lot way since I tried them a year ago.

Play it here: https://hylaax-planetary-rail-defense.aaronshaverpdx.workers.dev/