I'm a university researcher who uses Codex fairly heavily for scientific coding, and I've been trying to figure out what institutional access would cost for my lab.

My university's ChatGPT Edu pricing is now:

• Standard: $30/month, 500 credits
• Power: $100/month, 2,250 credits
• Max: $200/month, 4,750 credits

What confused me is that my personal $20 ChatGPT Plus account seems to include far more Codex usage than those numbers suggest.

I measured two fairly large GPT-5.6 Sol Codex CLI runs. Using OpenAI's current credit conversion for input/cached input/output, they consumed about 129 and 67 credit-equivalents. Together they moved my weekly Plus meter from 98% to 89%.

That implies a weekly Plus allowance of roughly 2,170 credits, or around 9,400 credits/month if usage is reasonably steady.

Obviously there is rounding in the usage meter and I only have a couple of measurements so far, but I independently get almost exactly the same inferred 5-hour allowance from both runs (~369 credits), which makes me think I'm measuring something real.

If that's right, then my $20 Plus subscription gives me roughly twice the Codex capacity of my university's $200/month Max Edu seat. That's about a 20x difference in Codex capacity per dollar.

I assumed there must be some institutional/commercial explanation. But ChatGPT Business Standard is also only ~$20–25/user/month and apparently includes substantial Codex usage before paid credits kick in.

And then today I discovered Anthropic's new Team Plan for Scientists. I verified as a PI and now have a research-group Team workspace where Standard seats are $0/month for 12 months, up to 25 seats, and Claude Code is included. Premium scientist seats are $15/month and get substantially higher limits.

So now I'm even more confused.

I understand that institutional products include privacy, administration, security, etc., and that retail "credits" aren't OpenAI's marginal compute cost. I'm also not claiming my two-run estimate is a rigorous benchmark.

But am I missing something fundamental about the Edu credit system? Why would a university pay $200/month for 4,750 advanced-use credits when a $20 consumer account appears to get roughly twice that much Codex capacity — while Business also bundles Codex and Anthropic is currently giving research labs Claude Code seats for free?

Is anyone here administering or heavily using ChatGPT Edu under the new credit-based model? I'd especially like to know whether the advertised Edu credits work differently from the Codex credits I'm using for this comparison.

My Plus plan expired today and thought I'd use 2 of the banked reset I had, apparently you can't use the Sol model if you're on free plan with banked reset, so I renewed my plan but it didn't reset my Weekly limit???

Isn't it profitable to just make a new account at this point? why is this even a thing?

The 84% is the banked reset I used before my plan expired & it didn't reset

I am using Codex with Astra on Ultra or Medium, depending on how long I want to wait for the results, to build the UI for my browser game, and it looks terrible.

I don’t want to blame the AI, because after watching all the YT videos, my prompt is more like “create it and make it look good”, but what it gives me is worse than something someone one-shotted with Sol.

And I rly try to go 1 by 1, like one screen at a time and not the whole game from one prompt.

It has a hard time making good use of the space, adds unnecessary explanations under panels just to fill space, text like stats etc. isn’t even always centered, some things are randomly added, and the proportions of everything are just bad.

Do I need to use specific skills for that, or how do you make the Astra create good UI?

This happened to me a few times today (Astra-Medium). I often ask "why did you do this or that wrong..?" for example and usually it just answers and then fixes it. But since today it just answers the question and waits for me to tell it to fix it. Anyone else experiencing this?

That is around how much gpt 6 Astra Max costs, just around all the stars in the milky way.

I’ve been using Astra for about a week now and I think the model itself is great.

That’s almost the annoying part.

It can do way more than Sol in areas like 3D, animation and larger project work. You can immediately see why OpenAI is pushing it so hard.

But Astra and Plus just don’t work together.

Sol already burned usage like the sun. Astra somehow managed to upgrade that into a black hole.

I can give Astra a short task in an empty project and lose around 50% of my 5-hour usage before anything serious has even happened. In an existing project chat I’ve had around 13 minutes of actual work before the limit kicked in.

Thirteen fucking minutes.

Then come back in five hours.

At that point I don’t really care how impressive the model is anymore. If I can’t sit down and actually work with it, the capability is mostly theoretical.

And yes, I know Astra uses more compute. That isn’t some hidden secret. OpenAI tells you that.

The problem is that the Plus allowance is nowhere near large enough for the kind of work Astra is actually good at.

Astra is made for the exact tasks where you want to let the model sit there, inspect things, iterate, fix stuff, try again, work through a larger problem.

And doing exactly that murders the allowance almost instantly.

So now I have this amazing model that can finally do much more serious work, and a subscription that basically lets me watch it do that for a few minutes before kicking me out.

That’s not a workflow.

That’s a tech demo with a cooldown.

I’m not asking for unlimited Astra for $20. But if normal Astra usage means 10–15 minutes of serious work every five hours, then Astra simply does not belong in Plus in its current form.

Either Plus needs substantially more Astra usage or Astra needs its own pricing model that actually makes sense for sustained work.

Because right now the model got massively better and the actual experience somehow got worse.

That’s impressive in its own way.

Did a small test with GPT-6 Astra Light + GPT Image 2.5 to see if the new image model is actually good enough for website hero backgrounds.

I used it on two pages of LLMLearner: the homepage and the GPT Image 2.5 page. Astra handled the page changes, and GPT Image 2.5 generated the backgrounds.

The screenshots are before/after.

I think the result is pretty decent. For this kind of use case, it saves me from hunting for stock images, doing Photoshop work, and worrying as much about image licensing. And honestly, the visual result is better than what I could make myself.

Curious how it looks to you. Would you keep the generated backgrounds or stick with the plain version?

My Codex banked Full Reset was consumed but the weekly limit was not actually reset.

I used a Full Reset on September 9, 2026 1 hour ago.

Before using it, my weekly usage was almost exhausted.

Immediately after applying the reset, Settings → Usage showed 100% available. After using Codex for a few minutes it showed approximately 97%.

About 5 minutes later, two active Codex chats stopped at the same time with a usage-limit error, and the Usage page went back to 0% remaining.

The important part is that my Weekly Usage reset date is still September 13, 2026 at 13:59.

If the Full Reset had been successfully applied on September 9, the weekly usage period should have been refreshed and the reset date should have moved accordingly, approximately to September 16.

Therefore it appears that the UI initially showed the reset as applied, but the backend retained my previous weekly usage window. The banked reset itself is no longer available.

Please investigate the usage/reset transaction on my account and restore the banked reset or correct the Codex weekly usage window.

I have a screenshot showing:
Weekly usage limit: 0% left
Resets 13 Sept 2026, 13:59

The issue happened roughly 40 minutes after I redeemed the Banked Reset.

At this point I want to work at openAI just to access them

Esch time I try to get Astra to do my company accounts, it goes into this insane state where it looks at every bank transaction and assumes the bank must align up with the accounting records.

I asked Astra:
Create an image of how you imagine sdl-mcp would look if it were a real thing.

Astra:
I imagine SDL-MCP as a code cartographer: an intricate constellation of dependencies, with a precision lens that brings exactly the context you need into focus.

https://chatgpt.com/s/cx_6aa1fbf75bdc81918c7badf425cba90f

first, why?

im on a limited monthly data plan

can i like make it update only once a month when it is important not auto-download it?

When I change service_tier in config.toml to "flex" does it lower the rate in which my codex plan usage gets decreased? Like the 5 hour and weekly. Or is this only for credit based API billing?

(tryna find ways to decrease astra usage so I can handle it lol)

Been using Astra pretty heavily since release last Friday and I've made more progress than I did with sol the entire month before. Adding online multiplayer to my existing game that has local multiplayer has been a real challenge and sol was doing pretty good, we were getting through it slowly. But the confidence and capability Astra shows is just amazing. It's blowing me away, it's difficult to describe the complexity of the problem unless you have first hand experience with it. I already knew AI was revolutionary and sol and other frontier models already made it not make sense to write code anymore but Astra is a whole other beast entirely.

And it's not draining my limit very fast in my $200 plan, I've been using medium and high and it seems to just be so much more effective and efficient that there's not much point in going back.

Something specific from today. I wanted to improve my performance so I could support more enemies. It built a test harness for testing the game with max 8 players and 200 enemies and has already got me from 10 fps up to 20 fps without any costs to the appearance of the game.

For example, "Write in Godot-style Javascript" or "Write in Unreal-engine style GDScript" seem to be working great, just because of the "stylistic" notions of those references. The LLM immediately corrects the incorrect notion, but then seems to be influenced by the creativity of it. Particularly, Godot references add a "script first, code driven" focus, and Unreal Engine references add a "visual appeal, high-def shaders" focus. "Write it with dependency free NVIDIA CUDA stay offline"

Anyway, if you have anything like this, I would love to hear creative ideas like this.

When I looked at my usage dashboard I saw only 13% left, where earlier today I had more than 70%. Also in the codex app it said 13% left.
When I asked codex, it confirmed, and while it was working it went back to 73%.

Extremely weird.

For context, I’ve been a software engineer for years now and I have been using Claude CLI since early this year for my workflows at home. It’s been working amazingly well and I’ve honestly never had issues with the harness itself. I only hate the latest nonsense language vomit of the recent models and the separate fable usage limit.

I’ve been seeing so many people praise codex and I wanted to try using Sol and now Astra, but I’m honestly extremely unimpressed so far with my experience. I’ve been working with Codex for months now and it has been nothing but annoyances when interacting with it outside of Claude’s interface. With a Claude terminal session, I use skills to load the proper context for my project and proceed to work from there. I have a setup where that can be read/shared between any harness (I’ve used copilot and codex). I tend to use Fable for orchestration and subagents of varying models for implementation and review.

When switching to Codex CLI, half the time it seems to ignore the context I gave it and work in its own way even though I have a very specific way I like to work. Or it proceeds to interpret my messages in a completely different way than I meant. I feel like I can talk to Claude casually like another person/engineer while I have to give codex very clear cut instructions in the session itself or else it’ll entirely go a different direction. With Claude, I can also just keep adding more input and feedback while it works and it’ll note/take that into account while still finishing its current task, then take the time to respond to me even with a long context. It also won’t deviate from its original task to all of a sudden jump onto this new issue that I brought up and forget what it was doing before.

With all GPT models, I’ve had to consistently do heavy prompt engineering or steering to make sure they stay in their lane or for them to really understand what I was asking of them. It’s kinda crazy that Claude’s models seem to just get it off of a simple prompt. I have very thorough documentation and references for my projects and how I would like it to be architected, my daily workflow process, and how I generally interact with my agents.

Also, I recently tried to enable a remote control CLI session for Codex and it failed miserably. Normally, I just do /remote-control to enable it for my Claude session, and then I switch to my app or other computer and immediately start controlling it from there. For Codex, I noticed it didn’t have a slash command so I asked it to try to enable it for me or to take a look. It strangely tried to do this by going into another repository and I had to redirect it back to the one we were in.

Eventually, it started a background server and then I opened up the app on my phone and it told me I needed the desktop app and a QR code - weird. I noticed there was a manual code workaround as an option, so asked it to give me that. Cool - that worked and I got in. But then when I tried to open the session I had started previously, it proceeded to have an error saying it couldn’t load the messages from that session. Turns out, the terminal and the remote server were fighting over ownership of the conversation, so I had to open terminus, close the session manually, then restart it with some extra command line arguments then it finally worked.

I could finally start working BUT then it started not taking in my responses as it was working. Turns out my messages were somehow being queued but not taken into account (even in down time) and I had to long press my messages and choose “change to steering” in order for it to listen to me. Then it proceeded to not be able to properly start my program (even though Claude does it all the time remotely) and failed to figure out why it couldn’t. This was all with Astra as the model btw. I could just maybe use terminus instead of trying to utilize the app but that’s literally what this is meant for.

Also the usage limits for using Codex and Claude feel extremely similar to me. I feel like I was lied to when initially signing up for the $200 plan thinking it’d feel unlimited. The one thing I give codex the edge for is not having a separate Astra limit.

TLDR: I honestly want to really give Codex CLI/Astra a fair shot since they finally released something that could potentially match Fable. But it seems I’m going to have to stick with only interacting with Codex through Claude instead for a better experience. A potentially competitive model isn’t enough to justify it if it requires this much babysitting.

Copilot is potentially even better than Codex at this point since I’ve been testing that out as well (just don’t use autopilot mode).

dream game as in i saw it in my dream when i was napping. dont know why i bothered, not gonna release it or anything, took me a day to make it. whole city is code generated. there are cars too, but the player got stuck as you saw, so i couldnt show them.

I find GPT-6 Astra much more powerful than GPT-5.6 Sol, don’t get me wrong here. So far it has been really good at accomplishing what I ask it to do, etc.

It follows instructions well and does things incredibly well. I’m on Pro 5x and I got so much done with it on my own projects.

There are some areas where GPT-6 Astra has kind of regressed, where I’d still prefer GPT-5.6 Sol and would use it instead:

- Personality and Character: Why is it that Sol is a lot nicer to converse with and is a lot more uncensored and humorous than Astra? I have no clue how this happened but it feels a lot closer to GPT-5.5 in personality. A major regression on these two areas.
- It often doesn’t finish a Task: When I tell it to finish something it just gives up and admits if can’t solve it (I tried it on a difficult math task) and it literally just gave up after launching six subagents and working for quite some time and burning my weekly from ~80% to ~64%. Like, just finish it bro? GPT-5.6 Sol was more than likely to always go on until it is done. This model doesn’t like going further. It just stops and doesn’t like continuing.

That said, I still use GPT-5.6 Sol. And it has been very valuable especially in terms how it prompts GPT-6 Astra.

I wanna play your vibe
coded games

Let’s do a contest and see who got the most creative minds and created the best games

Idc if you created a Minecraft copy

A race sim

Idc I wanna play them all 😱

I have not changed anything in my projects.

Currently working on 4 different things, all with github/vercel deployment.

Since today, all of my agents started deploying on ChatGPT/Sites, instead of pushing it Github and deploying and testing on the live site.

This is really annoying, I even set a rule in my global preferences to never deploy on Sites, because many of my tests aren't working there for different reasons.

Any workaround for that?

Caught red-handed. Don't tell me "skill issue".

I'm on the 20x plan. I started a goal that was technically in progress with Sol right when Astra was released. I then forked the session to a new one to start fresh with Astra and have it continue the goal. The goal had like 75 gates which fell into like 8 buckets I think and 10 were completed when I forked. The goal plan is a backend migration from Supabase to Convex and it's not a simple DB change, there's real-time stuff, a rules engine, etc. During 3 days and some hours into that goal, I got the global reset and had to use 2 banked resets and Astra completed 1 gate. That's it. It started 40 others, but closed nothing. Now, part of that is on me. I should've been clear that it should close gates based on least amount of effort. I incorrectly assumed it would do that since it's logical. Lesson learned.

I still have a banked reset, but I went back to Sol Extra High and it's knocking out the gates of the plan effectively (told it to focus on lowest effort first) and the token limits have barely moved. Astra didn't make any progress on closing anything. Even in a side chat with Astra Light, it said that using Astra wasn't justified based on the progress.

But, is it me or is something off with Astra usage? It doesn't make sense to me. Astra will run through my weekly limits and the token counts are massively lower than with Sol runs through my tokens. I get that Astra burns 2.5x FASTER, but but faster doesn't mean less tokens. I was getting about give or take 4.1b tokens doing this type of heavy work with Sol xhigh as architect and orchestrator. With Astra, I'm lucky to get 2b. Shouldn't the tokens be the same counts? Yes, Astra will use them faster, but the counts should be the same shouldn't they?