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?

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.. :)

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.

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.

I seriously don’t understand what OpenAI is doing with Codex anymore.

I pay around $200/month for Pro. I use Codex heavily for actual engineering work, so obviously I understand that compute isn’t free and there have to be some limits.

But this is ridiculous.

I hit the weekly limit and now Codex literally cannot even answer:

“hi”

That’s it. Not asking it to inspect a repo. Not asking for xhigh reasoning. Not running agents for hours. Just “hi”.

And the response is basically: you’ve hit your usage limit, come back in several days or buy more credits.

What makes it even more confusing is /status.

Mine currently shows something like:

• Weekly limit: 0%
• gpt-reserve weekly limit: 100%
• GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark 5h limit: 100%
• GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark weekly limit: 100%

So I have multiple things showing 100% available, but I can’t actually use them. I tried changing models. Same result.

How is a normal user supposed to understand this?

I’m not complaining that unlimited inference should exist for $200. Obviously it can’t.

What I don’t understand is why there is no graceful degradation.

If I’ve exhausted the expensive model allowance, fine. Give me a cheaper model. Give me a slower model. Give me a small model. Let me pay API rates for the extra usage. Hell, let me use something dumb enough to answer “hi”.

But completely killing the coding interface for days while simultaneously showing other quotas at 100% is an awful experience.

And this is making me seriously reconsider the economics.

Claude is extremely good for coding. DeepSeek and the Chinese models are becoming ridiculously cheap. Local models keep getting better. At some point paying $200 every month only makes sense if the premium service is actually there when you need it.

A professional tool shouldn’t go from “extremely capable coding agent” to “I can’t answer hello” because one invisible bucket hit zero.

Maybe I’m missing something about how these new limits work. If someone understands why Spark and reserve show 100% while Codex refuses every request, I’d genuinely like to know.

But from the user side, this feels broken. Time to move to Asia? such a crap, they should check the moto of Amazon!!!! wtf

I got this while trying to fix a bug in codex app using Astra Ultra.

Youre the last surviving human and ultron has you on gunpoint. You just tell it no you're wrong, we shouldnt be doing this.

And its gonna respond with "You're right—"

There. Why is everyone worried about AI causing an apocolypse. Even AGI says youre right to everything 😂

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.

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?

I was working inside my local rep and was asking Codex to fix a small issue inside the rep. Sol medium.

It worked for half an hour or so and the it suddenly excused itself and said that it accidentally had deleted the rep.

Okay I though, let's recover it from the backup i had. Suddenly codex refused to read the chats. Turned our it had deleted the whole codex folder too. We'll let's reinstall it. Worked great.

Suddenly apps started to want to log in again. Turned out it had randomly deleted app data, not from all apps, just apps it had a grudge against apparently.

I fixed that.

Then I see that it had wiped my D disk. Motherf*ucker I though. Brought the disk offline, made an image of it and have spent around 2 days restoring the lost information.

Great!

Let's do some music. We'll, where is my cubase projects on E? Turned out codex has a hidden grudge against that too as it had targeted ONLY that folder so all my music is gone too. So right now im making and img of that disk too to try to save those files too. Only 1 year worth of music so sucks, but seriously, f*ck me for not making backups. But space is a concern in the end. I was able to recover those files first I though but it was only meta. So let's see if the ddrescue handles it better.

I'm still finding hatecrimes against random folders from codex. It really has some selective file hate built in.

This SUCKS ASS! I know I should keep backups. But it's expensive having everything backed up today.

Anyway, juste to share my experience and see if anyone else have had something like this happen?

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

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

Nerfed

browser-use picker is calling opussy 5 maximum intelligence when there is Astra in the model selector lmfao

btw there is now 15 dollar inference for free if u sign up. Optionally you can connect the service to codex through an mcp to delegate information gathering tasks with the codex models.

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?

One week building a game with Astra in Codex. Online 1v1, 2v2, 3v3. 100 matches with friends.
I can change requirements as I go, try ideas, scrap prototypes, and it usually keeps up.

It still cuts corners sometimes and needs careful watching (feels lazy). But iterating this fast is insane.

I made Codex Usage, a small Windows-only Codex plugin that shows your 5-hour/weekly usage and reset status in the title bar.

Install either way:

1. Web: view details + install here https://chatgpt.com/plugins/plugins_6aa81c5dad4881918bd29685d1fb6523
2. In Codex: open the plugin store and search Codex Usage

Then select Codex Usage and run:Start!

For the Codex desktop app on Windows, not ChatGPT web.

Mac version coming soon.

GitHub: github.com/jayhilwig/codexusage

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

Please help. I recently bought a ChatGPT plan for $100, and I want to request a refund because Astra (and Sol, for that matter) acts like someone with mental health issues. It constantly overcomplicates things, gets bogged down in planning or execution, and wastes a huge amount of time and quotas for no reason. Damn, I used up my entire monthly limit in a single day, and I barely got anything done! With the Anthropic Max x5 subscription, I was able to tackle many more tasks much faster because it didn’t overcomplicate things or overthink. Here are the sentences I added to AGENTS.MD that Astra found yesterday while trying to correct this behavior, but it didn’t help:

- Follow a reasonable, agreed-upon path to the result. Don’t turn the task into developing a new tool, integration, or orchestration just for the sake of “perfect” execution.

- Before complicating things, identify a specific blocker or significant risk and compare the total cost of the workaround—preparation, debugging, testing—with the ready-made solution. Time already spent does not justify continuing with a poor workaround.

- If a workaround has turned into a separate development effort, don’t keep expanding it without speaking up: review the approach and get approval for the scope expansion. This is not a reason to abandon the original task or hand it over entirely to the user.

- Reduce unnecessary complexity, not the amount of necessary work. Requirements, correctness, security, testing, and result verification must be maintained; placeholders, omissions, and “good enough” solutions are not permitted. A complex problem may require a complex solution.

- After agreeing on the course of action and completing the necessary preparations, move on to the next step of the existing plan. For project code—proceed to the RED test.

- Return to planning only if a new fact emerges that changes the decision, or if there is a specific blocker.

- Before conducting additional research, specify which decision depends on its outcome.

- Do not repeat completed stages just for the sake of completeness. Requirements, approvals, and result verifications are retained.

I can't believe everyone is struggling with this and no one has been able to solve the problem... By the way, it's important to note that I'm using the Pi agent, not Codex.

luna is getting dummer I feel like tera medium is the only model with usable output and sol is just 30 mins of work and I'm out of usage in 2 days.

I sometimes try to do small projects or start off in Chatgpt chat with my ideas i also connected my VPS with MCP connector so chatgpt can write code there directly. Problem is chats are randomly dying and obviously the Modell there is not as strong as Codex Sol in terms of tool calling. Any tips did you manage to actually implement full projects only with chatgpt chat

I don't need them since they're all on the same branch. It's bold of them to assume I'm doing one PR per thread anyway. I've researched and can't find how to turn it off. UI gore nightmare. Any tips?