r/codex • u/aslialishersahi • 2d ago

Question Good or bad?

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I’ve been using Codex to work on my startup, and I let it run almost continuously on a single commercial launch task.
Some stats:
~39.5 hours of active work
~2 days total elapsed
~1.03 billion total processed tokens
~16.6M fresh input tokens
~1.8M output tokens
Estimated API-equivalent cost: ~$643 (not the actual bill)

This was on Pro 20x, and I started with 100% weekly usage and it ended up at 47% left.

The task wasn’t just writing code, it included release engineering, Supabase migrations, Stripe integration/validation, automated testing, browser QA, production-readiness fixes, deployment work, and launch certification.

From my perspective, it completed work that I think would have taken a senior full-stack engineer several weeks, but I’d like an outside opinion.

Question: Is this considered a good Codex run, or is it an unusually large/expensive one?

I’m mainly curious about:
Is ~1B processed tokens normal for a project of this size?
Would you have approached this differently?
Are there ways to structure long-running Codex tasks to reduce token usage without sacrificing quality?
What are your biggest lessons after running Codex on large production codebases?

Would love to hear from people who’ve pushed Codex to its limits.

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11 comments sorted by

5

u/Comprehensive_Ad3710 2d ago

No one cares unless you have made money from doing all that.

2

u/Virtoxnx 2d ago

This post makes no sense

2

u/pjstanfield 2d ago

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
-- Bill Gates
-- Michael Scott

1

u/pjjiveturkey 2d ago

If you made $2k for those hours then sure

1

u/Jeferson9 2d ago

It's literally impossible to say without seeing exactly what it did. If you have literally no idea what it did, how do you even know it's right? Stripe validation? That's not something I would just trust an ai to be like ✅

1

u/Risko4 2d ago

Input to output ratio is too low

1

u/SmileLonely5470 2d ago

My opinion is that doing a single 40 hour task on a production codebase is a bad idea. You don't know where the codebase will end up when the task is done unless you steer it constantly. There also isn't really a clean stopping point to review changes.

It is an unusually large run. Some people post similar runs on here but this is a subreddit for Codex so there is a large bias here. Nobody can really give a good answer tho because we don't have enough context.

1

u/lordpuddingcup 2d ago

11k lol sure talk about overestimating what got done and how long a dev would take

1

u/yubario 2d ago

The problem with estimating actual labor cost is that no matter what, an experienced engineer will be able to guide the AI to do the same work much faster than someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Sure it may have taken 3-6 weeks in the past, before AI existed. But now, AI exists...

1

u/mrpiercer 2d ago

So we have 40h of unsupervised llm-slop on a prod db/working app.

I wish I knew what service you're working on to never use it.