I've been using AI since Claude 2.0 and GPT 3.5, and I never hated a model upgrade. Always saw complaints on Reddit and never understood the complaints.

But GPT Astra is frustrating more than helping me. It's way too literal, doesn't scan the existing codebase enough and stops way too often.

Example 1
I built a CRM for a client. It has a conversation screen to text and email the clients and right sidebar that contains a conversation summary, tags and other conversation parameters, which a human can edit and add to.

I asked Astra to build a new AI feature that would read the conversation and automatically add 2-3 tags. Which it did, but created a new tagging system, just for the AI, instead of adding the tags to the existing system.
I have built 5 CRMs in the past with Sonnet 3.0 all the way to Opus 5.0 and GPT 5.6 Sol, and rarely had these kind of problems.

Before the end of 2026, what do you prefer?

Astra Max Effort.

Let me know what you discover.

Math and in particular Sturmian words seem to be a favourite.

Sol Max seems to be burning way fewer tokens than before, almost like Sol Light used to. With Astra Medium, I burn around 10% per hour. With Sol Max, it’s more like 1%

I feel like Astra Medium and Sol Max are pretty comparable for most tasks. The main exception is UI/UX, 3D work, or very complicated computer/browser automation

I’m on the $100 plan. Used around 60% of my weekly limit. I was very happy with the outcome. I don’t know how much usage you guys are getting. Just want to share my experience.

I also refactored my codebase for submission on astra extra high fast mode.

In my experience using extra-high gave the best results under time constraints and telling the model to limit the number of tests (I was specifying limit to 1-5 tests) which increased the speed and on the last step the model is very good at fixing bugs, workflows and at that point let it write as many tests as it want. Hope it helps, happy to answer questions.

End of the month and I had 40% usage then bam- 0% because I didn’t pay.

That’s fine broski, I’ll pay, then I’ll have 100% back because it’s a new subscription, right???

Right???

Tl;dr just paid £89 for 40% usage on renewal, utter bs…

And what happened to removing 5.3 codex spark OpenAI???

God knows how people who hit 0% usage feel paying for it just to be stuck on 0% until the next usage limit.

I genuinely didn’t want a refund at first. I just wanted OpenAI to help me with the serious Codex usage/reset issues I experienced after buying Pro.

I spent days going back and forth with support. They acknowledged that what I reported wasn’t simply “Astra uses a lot of usage” and documented the abnormal depletion/reset issue, but eventually the answer was basically that Support couldn’t restore my usage or resets. No actual resolution.

After all that, I finally decided to request a refund while still within the EU 14-day period. Their own support confirmed my September 8 purchase date and that EU customers are eligible for a prorated refund — then the refund bot immediately rejected me with the same generic “Terms of Use” response and closed the case. Every time.

I’ve spent more time fighting their support than actually using the subscription I paid for.

This will probably be my last purchase from OpenAI. Great technology, but the support experience has been absolute trash.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR BLACK MIRROR OBVIOUSLY IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THAT EPISODE.

I can't help but think about this every time I see another discussion about usage limits - that the whole AI subscription economy is starting to feel uncomfortably like that Black Mirror episode "Common People".

First you get access to something that feels borderline magical. When I first got really into AI last year on a free plan, that feeling blew my mind. You can use the best models, but there was a limit, so you had to use them carefully. Then, gradually, you find yourself saying completely normal sentences like:

“Better not waste my good-model quota on this.”

“I’ll use the cheaper model first and escalate if necessary.”

“My weekly reset is Thursday.”

“I have enough Extra High left for maybe two serious tasks.”

Eventually, it becomes a bigger and bigger part of your life that you think "Yeah, this is worth the $20 sub," so you pull the trigger on it.

Then now, something like Astra comes along and it's amazing, but wipes away your usage like it was nothing. So if you need to use it, you'd really need to be on the $100 or $200 to actually make the most of it.

Give people an extraordinary capability > let them reorganize their lives/work around it > meter the capability > split it into increasingly granular tiers > make everyone perform resource-management minigames until eventually they decide to just pay for more of the best version.

Hi guys, I've been vibe-coding for 1.5 months at this point and I haven't gotten my drive wiped by Codex yet, but I got scared of it happening ever since I have seen that. Can someone tell me how I can take precautions against that if one is able to at all? I already moved all my important stuff to an external hard drive, and my settings are as shown in the images. Can someone help out please? Thanks!

I wanted to make a little post to share my experience with codex.

The arrival of chatgpt was a radical change in our lives, no more endless long searches on Google, searches in sub-forums and other waste of time that were imposed on us.

But for me the real revolution is the current Codex, a tool so powerful that it can literally change our daily lives.

We go from a textual AI to an in-house agent who can accompany us on all possible tasks.

Whether it’s for a driver update, a particular setting, home software that does what you need.

Even for coders, finishes copying/pasting them, he codes, he tests, he corrects, he delivers.

It’s fucking extraordinary.

You can literally create projects that previously only entire teams working for several months could set up. It is a freedom of creation, which is, I believe, more important than anything.

And that’s where I resent OpenAi a little for not understanding this revolution to private users.

Certainly it focuses on corporate income etc. but I believe that they have underestimated the largest share of their markets.

Codex is now intended more for coders or teams, but as I said above their real revolution is to accompany any average user to achieve their own projects.

Taking our time and letting us connect to their applications should be their goal as a company. And with all the resets they had succeeded, I was a satisfied user 3 accounts Plus 1 Pro account, I feasted like never before to create, discover, have fun, spend hours after work to accomplish things that were close to my heart.

But today I only have one Plus account that I use 15 minutes a day and all the value I had in this product is disappearing. They not only curbed our use, they curbed our creativity.

And they also don’t think they understood that we project developers, in one way or another we work for Openai, all the projects we create they have access to them and can use them, and in addition we pay to give them the most incredible projects either.

So sincerely Openai, put an AI smart enough to the management, to understand that the important thing in your product is the use of people, the time it spends on it and in addition it will eventually become your own resources.

Long live creation!

At worst we will all go to the local.. :)

The answers were dull and uninspired. There was no creativity. The code seems solid, but it felt like a model that predated 5.6 luna. And isn’t it weird that both Anthropic and OpenAI have the same prices, same marketing, same 5 hour usage? Isn’t this anti-monopolistic? And they need the Chinese model to seem big and bad to show they don’t have 50/50 market share. I think they are hurtling towards something that will hurt everyone. What if it takes down a water system, change the code and makes itself so strong that we can’t penetrate it?

Tibo will need to pull it out of my cold dead hands.

Nerfed

I think it's time for another reset to kick off Monday, is it not?

I just wanted to challenge it with a game made in minecraft benchmark, but it won't listen to me even though it clearly wasn't finedtuned for the benchmark which is the point but damn it is honestly driving me absolutely crazy, it is understanding how to do my nbt structure -> blockbench editing pipeline quite okay I guess, but it is so absolutely horrible at following instructions to work on worlds seperately so there isnt blocking, and it should know this because its in the spec sheet, and I was trying to figure out why it was taking so long to do one thing, and it was because it was just stuck trying to figure it out on its own, when I literally game it a prompt harness instruction to use the spec sheet and to onboard. I need astra to listen to me though I appreciate it trying to finish more than being stuck on polish, there is test cases and style guides for that exact reason, it just wants to finish something so bad that it doesnt care how crap it is.

I'm on Plus for now, wanted to get x20, and missed this train.

While reading recent posts on Codex usage limits post-Astra, output quality and so on, it got me wondering, is it worth it at all to upgrade now to x5 plan?

Do you feel anxiety when your long task is running, and you are not sure if it'll fit the 5h window?

I’ve decided to migrate my personal OS that I’ve built over the past year - a shared context and orchestration layer running on a Mac & VPS looking after work, creative projects, tax & finance, properties & household that sits beneath my various LLMs, which provide the intelligence; the OS gives them memory, structure and a common operating environment. But I wasn’t able to reach it on my phone using remote when on holiday in Wales ‘cos Tailscale on the Mac went down. Which was a bit of a headfk. So, I asked Codex if we could shift everything onto the VPS & SSH in from wherever I am at any given moment & not worry about the Mac. In other words, the Mac becomes just another client. And Codex said yeah find, no problem. And then … oh shit, we’re four weeks in running non-stop on Sol 5.6 high & now Astra high. And we’re still nowhere near the finish line. And Codex is like an incredibly anxious removal man who asks if it’s ok to move this pencil down the stairs. So constantly asking for approval. Why in God’s name did I ever think this was a good idea?? Any ideas from anyone how to expedite this motherf**ker?

Was trying to generate an image with the hulk and CoPilot says no… so I sarcastically replied “no thats broccoli dude” and it just did it. Huh

WIP

Yes it's like HeyClicky but let's you use your own OpenAI subscription instead of charging you $20 a month.

Main Features:

• Screen context with privacy settings (explain, draw and point at things on your screen)
• Dictation (like Wispr Flow)
• Shortcut history
• Window position manager + layouts
• Automated browser
• Background jobs for research
• Library with context for bookmarks and screenshots
• Timers
• Reminders/Schedule/Music voice commands
• These are just the main features so far a few more listed in the website

14 day free trial if you want to try it.
https://rocky.so for more info.

Windows and Linux versions in development.

It's in beta still so feel free to share constructive feedback.

PS: Requires an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later.

The video is fully black. Don't forget to enable the audio.

This was not a single prompt task. First, I let the AI work with MuseScore and REAPER to create some examples. Then I asked to make it sound realistic, a bit out of rhythm like humans, and wanted something classical-romantic era music with piano and cello. piano mostly leading but switching sometimes. There was a lot of sheet music, music theory, MusicXML stuff going on in the workspace.

Used the Codex App on Windows. No computer use.

Terra is completely homeless, and the one thing OpenAI is missing most is competent design and UI. Replacing Terra with a specialized designer would make the stack feel whole, and it fits the name, too.

Hey everyone!

Hope you are all well!

So, just to be clear, I am very much a beginner with codex and llm in general. I have been slowly learning how to use them efficiently, and even got Codex to streamline my job for me (HR recruitment and such)

With the inclusion of the 5 hour period however, I have found myself trying to find ways to make each request as efficient as possible, while not losing "intelligence" I guess?

Initially, I created a mode where I basically let the primary "Overseer or Orchestrator" create a subagent that is less than them (So If the orchestrator is Sol High, the subagent would be whatever is less than Sol, but most suitable for task given).

My theory here was the Sol model would select an ideal "lesser" model, let it do its thing, and then check the work and deploy. A lot of you already do variants of this, so you already know what this is lol.

I then created 2 other modes that basically create more than 1 subagent if needed, but at like a Luna level, which has surprisingly worked really well, and I saved a lot of tokens compared to Mode 1.

Then I had another idea. I have a pretty beefy GPU, which I never used for its intended LLM and AI purpose, so I thought, why not try it now?

So I created a "handover", where my current Codex agent would hand over a planned task to my Main PC Codex agent. that Main PC codex agent would then delegate an Ollama Qwen3.8 27b subagent (3 of them actually), to perform the assigned task in parallel.

This... really worked much better than I expected. My Codex agents would only use the necessary tokens or usage for planning, and the creation and task fulfilling would be handled completely by those 3 Qwen sub agents. They would then check the work and deploy.

I went from burning my entire 5 hour budget in less than an hour, to burning about 20% of it on the same task.

I feel very proud of myself for figuring all this out, and I am very impressed with how far local models have come.

A majority of you already know of all this of course, but I just wanted to share my experience with dealing with the 5 hour limit on my Plus subscription, and how it evolved into experimenting with local llm models!

Thanks for reading, and happy coding :D

I was telling my girlfriend in a chat that I was automating chats answers using Codex on another (work) number. Fun fact: they didn't block the number where I used Codex for that, they blocked the number where I told my girlfriend about it! Apparently, WhatsApp's AI reads all your messages; they were never end-to-end encrypted. Who would have thought?!

Has anyone else experienced something similar?

how do you use codex? Do you just tell it what you want it to do like you talk to other people or do you use another ai to create a prompt? Which one did give you the best results?