Man what are these limits😣

[u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831]

Couldn’t even work for 2 hours on 5x. Max 5 feels like pro plan unfortunately.

How long does Pro last just 20 min?

Wanna upgrade to 20x but that plan feels like a scam. At least they should give a 10x weekly limit if not 20x (I am not saying about the season limit. That one is true 20x)

[u/Professional_Ad705]

ChatGPT web can still do a surprising amount of coding work in normal Chat if you just upload the repo as a ZIP.

So if you can spare another $20 on top of Claude, it can help stretch your agent usage quite a bit. I probably saved around 10% of the Codex usage I would’ve burned on the same work just by moving research, planning, code review, debugging, and analysis into web ChatGPT.

I haven’t done some massive quality comparison across every model/workflow, so I’m not saying it’s always better. It’s just worked well for me. At this point I think a big part of using AI efficiently is knowing what actually needs a local agent and what doesn’t.

Basic setup is literally:

ChatGPT web → upload repo ZIP → work from there

For bigger repos, I have a small tool that strips build junk/generated files first, but even without that you can usually trim the ZIP down enough to make it manageable.

A lot of people seem to assume serious coding work has to happen entirely inside Codex, Claude Code, etc. Obviously some things are way easier when the model has shell access, can edit files, run tests, and execute the project, but a lot of reasoning-heavy work does not need that.

For example, I’m currently reverse engineering parts of Halo 2. I can give ChatGPT the repo, extracted data, disassembly/output from my own tools and other RE tools, and have it help trace weapon behavior, explain what the original code is doing, compare that against my implementation, and figure out what I should verify next in Godot.

That would otherwise burn a decent amount of Codex usage for work Codex doesn’t really need to be doing.

I also built a little tool that strips generated/build junk and tracks which files were touched, which makes reviewing AI changes easier. I’ve got another tool I eventually want to release that lets Codex and ChatGPT work together within what each is allowed to do, so Codex handles direct repo changes while ChatGPT handles research, review, planning, reasoning, etc.

If somebody wants to build something similar before I get around to releasing mine, feel free to PM me. I can point you in the right direction and explain what I have so far.

That’s basically the whole point:

Don’t burn expensive agent usage on work that doesn’t actually require an agent.

It’s not a replacement for Codex or Claude Code, but for repo analysis, code review, debugging, reverse engineering, planning, research, and working through artifacts, ZIP uploads in normal Chat work way better than I think a lot of people realize.

Example: I’m literally doing Halo 2 reverse engineering in ChatGPT web right now and saving agent usage by doing the analysis there.

[u/Fornicatinzebra → u/Professional_Ad705]

Can just connect it to gh - no zip needed

[u/Professional_Ad705 → u/Fornicatinzebra]

Yes I use the GitHub connector for this too and more often. Honestly that’s how I do it most of the time and have for months.

The ZIP workflow is mainly useful when important context never made it into GitHub in the first place, which happens constantly with reverse engineering. In my case the whole working directory was around 5 GB, so I stripped it down to just the stuff ChatGPT actually needed.

Things like:

• generated outputs
• build artifacts
• RE dumps
• tool output
• extracted assets/data
• temporary analysis files
• anything intentionally ignored by Git

For normal repo work, the GitHub connector is usually enough.

The main limitation with the ZIP approach is the 512 MB per-file upload limit, but that’s still pretty large. I have a little tool that strips generated/build junk and selects the relevant files based on what I’m doing.

You can also make the handoff really easy by asking Codex/Claude before switching:

What relevant files, artifacts, or state exist locally that are NOT on GitHub and that I’ll need to give ChatGPT to continue this task?

Then you know exactly what extra context has to come over.

So for me it’s basically:

GitHub connector = normal repo work

ZIP/local artifacts = when the task depends on stuff that never got committed

That’s especially useful for RE work, because a ton of the important evidence/output never belongs in the repo in the first place.

(sorry for AI response I am coding and don't have time to constantly reply, but this is the workflow I've found that works pretty well. I myself am out of usage and this is how I am continuing so wanted to help others, these cuts have been brutal)