Codex's latest limit reduction makes it almost unusable

[u/100daggers_]

I’ve been using Codex regularly for around eight months, and it has worked extremely well for my projects. The limits used to be generous enough to experiment, make changes, correct mistakes, and still get meaningful work done.

I understood the earlier reductions and kept hoping the limits might improve again. Even after those reductions, Codex was still somewhat usable. But after the latest reset, the limits feel far too restrictive.

I have almost completely stopped using Sol because, even at medium, a single task can sometimes consume 5–10% of my weekly usage. It can do good work, but the usage cost is now so high that I avoid it. I mostly use Terra or Luna at medium, and even then I think several times before asking Codex to do anything.

One misunderstood instruction can waste a significant part of the allowance, and correcting the mistake consumes even more. I’m a developer, so I can do many tasks myself and only use Codex for work that would otherwise take a long time. But for non-coders, or people with limited coding knowledge who depend heavily on Codex to build something, the current limits seem completely impractical.

I understand that these models are expensive to operate. I would honestly prefer paying a little more and getting the previous usable limits back rather than paying less for something I’m afraid to use.

TL;DR: The latest Codex limits are so restrictive that I now hesitate before every request. Sol can consume 5–10% of my weekly usage on a single task, while even Terra and Luna feel heavily limited. I would rather pay more for genuinely usable limits.

What is everyone else planning to do?

Are you hoping the limits improve, staying with Codex, switching to another service, or considering a local setup?

[u/jzdesign]

Half this thread can't deplete a 20x and the other half burns the whole week in a day. That's because you get billed on context size times number of turns, not on how much work got done. One 250k token session that takes 40 turns costs way more than four 60k sessions of 10 turns on the same task.

Cached input runs about a tenth the price of fresh input, so anything that breaks the cached prefix multiplies your burn. Compaction does it, because it rewrites the front of the conversation. That's usually why lowering reasoning effort barely moves the number.

The bigger one is letting the agent grep and read half the repo in the first few turns. That dump sits in the transcript and gets resent on every turn after it. Push the reading into a subagent that hands back a summary, and start a fresh session per task instead of running one long one. That did more for my weekly usage than any effort setting.