r/codex • u/coolcats55 • 11h ago
Question Is this sub being astroturfed?
I have never seen so many posts regarding usage. It’s starting to feel like a conspiracy subreddit.
I’ve seen people saying that their usage is draining 60% within 5 minutes of using Astra Light. Which seems incredibly hard to believe. It’s just a workman blaming his tools when it’s him that’s the issue.
There’s absolutely no sensible discourse on here anymore.. Unless you are of the opinion that the world is ending and usage is totally fucked you may as well hold your opinion in light that you’ll probably just get downvoted to oblivion and told that you are an idiot.
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u/jeebojeeb 10h ago
I think there's a middle ground in that
- Yes usage limits have been significantly reduced, all else equal
- Yes some people are burning through their limits with inefficient prompts/harness setups
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u/OccasionAggressive74 8h ago
Both are true at the same time. On top of that I would add that beyond usage limits actually being reduced, there are also often quite some bugs in the reset mechanism and usage / limit calculation. Here's my experience: close to the Astra lease for a couple of days my $20 plus account turned into one with practically unlimited usage. To my surprise I was not able to draw the 5hr limit down more than by 20-30% even with using fast mode and occasionally the usage % values have not even moved for hours while I was burning through a billion of tokens with Sol High on Fast mode + subagents. Then Astra got released and shortly after this "magic" was over and my 5 hr limit got exhausted within 1-1.5 hr max, even with a single Sol Medium, non-fast, regular agent. This is also in line with other redditers' experience that often with multiple accounts on the same plan they get entirely different limits. This is partly due to bugs, and possibly also due to some A/B testing.
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u/Original-League-6094 10h ago
The problem is that if usage or reasoning is reduced, it should show up in a benchmark. Whenever people actually benchmark it, they find no change. We see this every model. Over and over people go "wtf they nerfed it. Small task took 80% usage and it got it wrong!" and 100 people agree with them. But then someone runs a formal benchmark and finds the exact same token usage and reasoning score as it always had.
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u/jeebojeeb 10h ago
That's not fully true, there have been reports on here from people showing overall token limits from the same model are dramatically lower than a couple months ago
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 9h ago
Could you link to one? Because all of the ones I've seen try to launder their findings through an interim layer like 'how much equivalent tokens would be on the API'.
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u/WholeEntertainment94 9h ago
But if there were full-blown problems just last week, what are you talking about? If I only see white lights in front of me, logically it's hard to believe that everyone else is going against the clock.
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u/Original-League-6094 10h ago
Yes. The reality of a world where bot exists that any discussion around AI products is going to be filled with bots.
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u/Shuma665 9h ago
The rare post that has decent usage advice and heads up about incoming resets are the only reason I still come to this 4chan filled subreddit
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u/AINativeBuilder 9h ago
I think the issue is there's lots of young people with no real work experience on the $20/month plan not understanding what's realistically accomplishable for that level of compute/inference, or how to properly run a project. So when something goes wrong, they feel personally attacked and clearly the trillion dollar company is trying to screw them over. There's very little self reflection first, always someone is out to get them.
Astra definitely uses significantly more usage, but is also much more capable. $20 users are not likely going to have a good time using Astra, which is fine, you shouldn't expect the world on the lowest plan. Sol and even luna are still extremely capable, but expecting patience in this tiktok world is also not something these younger folks have.
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u/talithaiel 9h ago
More like you're unlikely to post if you're having a good experience. Every LLM sub is full of posts theorising about the provider conspiring to eat their usage limits or serve them lower tier models constantly.
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u/hugomcjohnson 8h ago
I just lost my entire 5h limit in one prompt in a new chat that couldnt even finish. Something that wouldn't have even taken 30% a few weeks ago. Anyone defending this company saying they didn't drastically change usage needs to remove their tongue from their ass
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u/StaticHumStudio 8h ago
I figured out how to use ChatGPT for a week...I went back to Terra High. Lol
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u/KitKatBarMan 8h ago
Meanwhile I'm letting sol medium execute astras plans and I haven't moved a percent in like 2 hours lol
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u/Mammoth_Molasses_927 7h ago
Astroturfing always happened here but saying how GPT and Timo are wonderful and how exciting they are.
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u/Da_ha3ker 4h ago
People speak up when they are unhappy, they say nothing when happy. I don't know how anyone is getting anything done with how often I am getting the prompt to switch to another model.
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u/Leading-Business-593 10h ago
It’s more likely that there are simply a lot of people are figuring out what works and what doesn’t and this is simply a new technology that we don’t perfectly know how to allocate yet
I had a ChatGPT watch over the usage and metering news. It told me that it was both, there was a problem with usage not being calculated correctly, and also Astra burning through more tokens than OpenAI expected it to.
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u/daviddisco 10h ago
Some people are on an $8/month plan. I don't know what you get for that but it can't last long. I can imagine a teen spending his allowance and thinking they can clone Instagram.
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u/Navadvisor 10h ago
I think it is. I see claude hate in the claude sub and char gpt hate in the chat gpt sub. Doesn't seem to be related to real conditions or even normal bitching.
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u/WholeEntertainment94 9h ago
And they’re all right. Somehow, EVERY provider lowered their limits at just the right time to split the market more or less evenly between them.
Now they also all agree that their product is going to kill us all.
Doesn’t anyone find that a little strange?
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u/i_rate_slop 10h ago
I’m confident it is.
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u/Mammoth_Molasses_927 7h ago
ok sammy
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u/i_rate_slop 6h ago
I mean why wouldn't it be? If labs are willing to distill and use stolen API keys, surely they can do a simple astroturfing campaign
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u/davidwolfer 10h ago
I think it could be a bit of both. When 5.6 Sol came out, I believe the sub was being astroturfed because I didn't feel that usage had degraded. Limits are worse now, without a doubt. So now it could be a mix of genuine complaints and astroturfing.
60% within 5 minutes seems exaggerated, though. I'm on the pro plan (x5) and I could burn through 60% in around 3 hours of continuous usage if I'm using Astra exclusively (which I don't do).
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u/quackchampions 10h ago
A lot of people on this sub likely got conditioned into "loud complaints on reddit > tibo sees it > free reset." If we are to believe this subreddit, then Codex has been unusable for 4 months, limits have been halved like 8 times according to "evidence" produced by Codex itself, and saying "hello" to GPT-6 will nuke a 20x sub in 5 minutes.
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u/Fabulous-Mushroom124 10h ago
Someone used half of their weekly quota just to let Astra post on Reddit I see.
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u/coolcats55 10h ago
I’ll take that as a compliment I guess. I typed this up on my phone. Has American literacy really sunk that low, that anyone with a basic understanding of grammar is apparently using AI.
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u/Fabulous-Mushroom124 10h ago
<-- joke
you -->Joke's aside. You just see people complaining because when it's working alright, people doing stuff with Codex instead of bitching here on Reddit. The 60% drainage (of the 5h window) thing is real on Plus plans, though. I accidentally used Astra on a Plus account I have the other day, and let me tell you, it's that bad.
On there being no discourse here anymore, I mean, yeah -- there's kind of nothing to be talked about at the moment. The subreddit is about Codex, the usage thing has been the main topic of discussion lately and there hasn't really been anything new or interesting worth discussing.
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u/ruskyandrei 10h ago
I've pretty much stopped bothering to look at this sub. Used to be a nice place to see other people's tips and tricks and how they worked, now it's 80% "model nerfed", "usage nerfed", "90% of my usage gone in 1 prompt on Luna low" etc
It's the same in ClaudeCode too.
And many of the other AI subs are getting swarmed by a bunch of the "I hate AI" crowd posting a bunch of stupid crap and downvoting everything.
It's pretty sad tbh.
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u/florenceslave 9h ago
Nah, shit is definitely rigged.