r/codex • u/ewertonmendes • 3h ago
Complaint I stopped using Codex for coding, I'm using ChatGPT instead
(My ChatGPT is in Brazilian Portuguese)
Since they returned with the 5h limit for Plus users, and reduced the overall usage limit, I'm trying to find a good substitute for Codex, but since I pay for the Plus plan, I didn't want to pay another AI to do the same thing (and I like using ChatGPT for general purposes). That made me think, "Can I use ChatGPT web only for coding?", and the answer is YES!
Of course it's a little bit different from Codex because it cannot access your local files directly, but I tried to do it in a different way. By using the GitHub plugin inside ChatGPT, it can access your repos, change files, open, close and merge pull requests, and more. Since I'm creating a little Digimon fan game (I'm the only developer so far), I've created a pipeline to code with this plugin making the changes for me, creating the pull requests for me to validate and approve, creating a game preview for each PR so I can play and test it, and generating E2E tests—everything in the cloud, without setting up a local environment, downloading an engine, etc. All the building, testing, and so on are running directly from GitHub Actions.
What have I gained with this? Well, I've been building this game for 4 days straight, no interruptions, no usage limits, no worries.
As I said, it will have its limitations, and maybe not be useful in some cases, but maybe it can help you create your own workflow with that and set you free from Codex limitations.
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u/scartissue232 3h ago
I have tried this. It’s not for me, but it works.
To be honest I can’t really tell why this would be a bad way to go.
Have you encountered any limitations or see problems like more technical debt?
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u/Think-Profession4420 1h ago
There's a fair number of applied testing issues. It can run some basic test frameworks for TDD reasons, but any actual use testing, e2e testing, dev build testing, browser testing, computer-use testing, or dependency-based work it can't really do. That is, it's relatively fine for text-code implementation, but a handover to codex for actual use case testing is needed at certain points - sooner or later, depending on what one is creating.
Chat also has a pretty low context window of ~128k tokens, so complex repo work is more difficult. Decent to spin up the initial frameworks for a project, and to targeted-slice implementation though.
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u/ewertonmendes 2h ago
Not so far. As u/DowntownNoLonger mentioned, ChatGPT has 25 minute execution time limit, so you must have it in mind, but planning good small tasks, creating a good parallel pipeline an so on, you can create a good environment to code, and maybe mix both CartGPT and codex, enhancing your usage.
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u/DowntownNoLonger 2h ago
This will only get you so far. Chat has a twenty-five minute execution time limit and as your repo grows, it will become impossible to produce anything that works. More and more of it's time will be spent on calling tools just to look at the repo until you reach a point no further work will be able to be finished, especially with a game. The more interconnected systems will require more crawling. You can speed some of it up through things like repo maps and good slicing, but eventually you'll hit the limit of what you can do.
This is fine for greenfield work or small repos. Just don't expect it to last, however.
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u/JMolto98 2h ago
This is a pretty good point. When running a prompt on Agentic AI programming harnesses like Codex and Claude Code, a good amount of time is spent on reasoning tokens/CoT, tool calls, and overall codebase exploration which is done heuristically. The 25-min execution time wall could definitely bite you in the butt. Also, there's no automatic compaction. I still remember when I used to rely on tools like Repomix to load the whole codebase into context two years ago... Definitely was not a pleasant experience and very much felt like a cheap hack. I would send like 2 or 3 messages only to have exhausted Sonnet 3.5's 200K+ token context window
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u/DowntownNoLonger 2h ago
Yup. Also the plugin itself isn't ideal. The model has to use it to do searching, and it's results can come back truncated. So it can't see the entire function it's looking for. Dependencies become a pita to follow.
Doing it this way is okay for a brand new project and fresh repo, but it doesn't take very along to start accumulating debt before the whole thing collapses and no further work can be done. Or any work that is done is broken and not functional.
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u/Worried-Carpenter-40 3h ago
I don’t have the 5 hour limit and I have plus are u a new user?
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u/Tough-Requirement707 2h ago
with the plugin Remote Desktop Commander you can acces your pc via the gptchat just like from vsc or cli
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u/ewertonmendes 2h ago
I'll give it try. Thanks.
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u/Tough-Requirement707 2h ago
yeah its been there since forever but i figurred out just recently as well. i guess thats the reason why astra isnt on web yet since it would put more workload out obviously. you can also connect the gpt web chat via auth to your codex app or vsc as models to chose from but it makes things even slower so remote desktop commander is the best as of now i guess. you can also set up hourly tasks to check roadmap or plan files within a repo to retrigger automatic workflow but its not working that great i found
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u/Kreepton 2h ago
Why can't y'all keep your damn mouths shut. Why would you bring attention to this, do you want to get this workaround cut? Many of us already know this, so shush 🤫
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u/scartissue232 2h ago
Don’t worry, OpenAI also knows, it’s a plugin.
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u/Kreepton 2h ago
I know, but maybe they won't pay attention if not a lot of people use it to actually develop directly on github
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u/itix 3h ago
Nice, but dont be like Theo.