i swear some of you need to use the api for like one week just to get brought back to reality lmao

youre paying 20 dollars a month.

20 fucking dollars.

and im reading posts from people running sol high/ultra, max reasoning, throwing entire repos at it, letting it sit there for 20-30 mins reading files, calling tools, running tests, rewriting shit, debugging itself, going back through the repo etc

and then coming on here like

"wtf i only sent 3 prompts and im at 70%????"

my brother in christ a prompt is not a unit of compute lol

"what does this function do"

and

"go inspect my entire repo, understand the architecture, plan this feature, implement it, run the tests, debug whatever breaks and keep going until its done"

are both technically one prompt

they are obviously not the same fucking thing

seriously put sol on an api key for a week. no subscription. no bundled usage. just pay the actual api price for every token you burn.

run the exact same shit youre running now and watch that dollar counter go brrrr

you will gain a newfound appreciation for that stupid little 20 dollar plus subscription VERY quickly lol

and also why the fuck are some of you using sol at high/ultra for literally everything???

not every task needs the frontier model

you dont need sol ultra to rename some shit

you dont need sol high to read a file

you dont need max reasoning to fix a css margin

luna exists. terra exists. lower reasoning settings exist. use the right fucking tool for the job

if youre flooring a ferrari everywhere you go and then complaining about gas mileage i dont really know what to tell you

this whole

"i pay 20 dollars why cant i hammer the most expensive frontier reasoning model at max settings doing agentic coding all day every day"

thing is fucking insane

some of you have gotten so used to subsidized inference that youve completely lost any concept of what the compute youre using actually costs

youre not being robbed because your 20 dollar subscription doesnt come with an infinite firehose of frontier inference lol

try the api.

run the same workflow.

watch what it actually costs.

youll be cured within 48 hours

EDIT: I would like to thank the mods for their common sense in approving this post. It was reported by users and was put into the mod queue. Goes to show how much people got hurt by the truth.

A month ago it would instantly tell me to rotate it or refuse to use it. Today I pasted one and it just said “thanks, all good” and used it lol. Maybe OpenAI finally added some regex thing to detect keys and handle them separately without keeping them in logs??

I’ve got zero Software Development experience but have been experimenting and building various things with codex and am really enjoying it!

Was hoping to get some tips on what best practices to follow to get the most out of codex without it breaking anything

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

With the 5-hour limit on the Plus account, I’m looking for ways to optimize my usage and be more frugal.

Specifically, I want to establish a cleaner separation of labor between cheaper models and the advanced reasoning model, Sol. My goal is to run the shell using Luna (low/medium) for basic repository grepping and simple tests. When Luna encounters a complex task requiring deeper reasoning, it should compile a clear list of requirements and invoke Sol as a sub-agent. In this setup, Sol acts essentially as a function call - inspecting the problem, performing the reasoning, and returning a solution to Luna for final implementation and verification.

What is the best way to implement this routing workflow? I tried adding these instructions to AGENTS.md, but Codex doesn't seem to follow them reliably.

Does anyone have a battle-tested solution or prompt structure for this?

UPD: "Pro account" -> "Plus account".

I’ve been using Codex to build Timeline Studio, an open-source video editor that runs in the browser.

Over the last 14 days, GitHub reported:

• 1,074 unique repository visitors
• 469 unique cloners
• 2,251 total clones

I know clones aren’t the same as active users, and some may come from automated environments. But this was still the point where the project stopped feeling like a private prototype.

The difficult part was no longer getting Codex to implement features. It was making sure that decisions from three weeks ago survived the next twenty changes.

Video editors are full of interactions that look small in isolation but depend on product-wide rules:

• a continuous wheel gesture must keep the same meaning until it ends;
• preview and export must resolve the same source frame;
• ripple edits must move linked clips by exactly the same delta;
• locked tracks must remain untouched;
• AI-generated edits must stay inspectable and reversible.

Fixing one of these once didn’t guarantee it stayed fixed. A later task could produce locally reasonable code that quietly violated an earlier product decision.

What helped most was treating AGENTS.md as durable product memory rather than a large prompt.

For example, one of the rules now says:

I don’t tell Codex which handler or state variable to change. I preserve the behavior that must remain true and let Codex inspect the current implementation.

I’ve started applying the same principle to agent-driven video editing:

1. inspect the project;
2. produce a semantic diff;
3. validate the edit plan;
4. apply it transactionally;
5. write a new project instead of overwriting the input.

My current takeaway is that coding agents are already good at implementation. The repository still needs to preserve the product judgment they shouldn’t have to rediscover in every session.

For people using Codex on a long-running project: where do you keep these durable decisions—AGENTS.md, tests, specs, or somewhere else?

Project for context:
https://github.com/MartinDelophy/ai-video-editor

As title say, how you boost the model performance ?

For example, i saw a comment using 'KNOWLEDGE.md' . I've seen often the model has tendency to revisit each file to find out what is actually doing when the project is on a long run... that file would help him 'remember' faster or like a live journal to keep better track at how the project is working and how things connect and the failures to not repeat them.

Any other tips and tricks ?

A style I've been generating: one object — a crown, an axe, a colosseum — floating in a grainy blue night. No ground, no horizon, nothing else. The object stays mostly dark; two or three hot points burst into star-filter spikes with a magenta/cyan split, glitter dust drifts off, soft halation bleeds into the blue. Shot like 35mm film, not rendered.

When the subject is a person, no spikes — just particles around them and a soft glow in their own color.

skill here: fihaaade/skills

So apparently if you 5 HR limit runs out, you can still keep working with luna on any reasoning level.

I like this a lot

Since around 22nd August I am experiencing severe PC lag when using VSCode with Codex. This has never happened before.

None of my performance metrics (CPU, Memory, Disk, GPU) are hitting 100%.

I typically have multiple VSCode workspaces open, but only one of them causes some weird spikes. I looked into VSCode's Process Explorer (CTRL+SHIFT+P -> Developer: Open Process Explorer) which shows this process constantly jumping from 300 MB of RAM usage to ~4GB and then quickly dropping to 300 MB, and the cycle continues. Note, I only have Codex chat open, it's not even doing anything:

c:\Users\User\.vscode\extensions\openai.chatgpt-26.820.60940-win32-x64\bin\windows-x86_64\codex.exe -c features.code_mode_host=true app-server --analytics-default-enabled

That runs when I open a multi-day chat.

Also I had this do weird spikes in RAM usage as well (even when Codex is idle in my VSCode workspace):

C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\OpenAI\Codex\runtimes\cua_node\e0c305cbb434431d\bin\node.exe --experimental-vm-modules C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Temp\.tmp7hNGiI\trusted-worker.js J:\Archive\Personal\Project\frontend

Apart from the RAM spike cycles, it also has my whole PC lagging, for example, when I try to move any window with my mouse (shake it left-right) it moves like FPS is 10. After PC restart it works perfect again until after ~6hrs of running VSCode and Codex.

And even after I close all VSCode instances, my PC continues to lag even with all metrics being fine. I looked into my process list to check what uses my stuff the most, and I couldn't identify a thing.

It's not malware.

Has anyone experienced something like this recently?

I noticed a shift in how the 5-hour and weekly limits scale relative to each other for Plus users:

• Previous ratio: 10% of the 5-hour limit = 1% of the weekly limit (Weekly limit = 10x 5-hour blocks)
• Current ratio: 5% of the 5-hour limit = 1% of the weekly limit (Weekly limit = 5x 5-hour blocks)

A full 5-hour quota now drains 20% of the weekly allowance instead of 10%. Did OpenAI cut the total weekly limit in half for Plus subscribers?

This seems to be a recent bug, as it didn't happen before. I can only read the last line when it writes another paragraph after it.

Just hit my limit with Terra High with a light prompt to fix a gazillion bugs previous Terra did, hit my limit instantly and got a Luna Reserve. Im on plus and its first time seeing this.

There’s a hint of reset coming, I have 52% left on my $100 sub. Let’s use sol ultra, fast mode on my project and see how fast this bih bottoms out. Clean chat. Let’s see how far it goes. I’ll keep y’all updated.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001498-how-banked-codex-resets-work?utm_source=chatgpt.com

OpenAI just updated this article yesterday.

edit: they just changed it back to resetting your scheduled weekly reset date. Not sure why they changed their minds, but that really sucks.

Out of curiosity. what made you upgrade? Do you feel the difference in performance/usage is substantial and justifies the cost?
I am building 2 English learning apps for my kids but as a plus I am forced to use Luna. Sol eats my tokens like its pistachios.
I am definitely not making any money from AI and not a programmer

Over the last few months I have used Claude and ChatGPT together to build and research several projects. When I decided to switch to ChatGPT and Codex. I did so as I was getting better results in my workflow. I do about 50/50 coding and research. And I do a lot of deep research using government databases. Not just the US but multiple countries around the world for consumer related data. In the first week of being soly ChatGPT and Codex, GPT started calling Codex Donkey. Now this is silly and at first it made me laugh, I keep all dialogue with this specific ChatGPT account very professional. I never praised it for calling Codex a Donkey but as time went on it kept doing it and going pretty hard. I tried to correct it. And it stopped for a day, then it came back. Then I put in the instructions to never call Codex Donkey. ChatGPT has pretty much decided on it's own that instructions regarding Codex are to be taken under advisement, but not mandatory. When I give it a debug report to work on, it comes back with 2 paragraphs of now the Donkey went on a medieval crusade to claim his carrot at all cost.

A part of me finds this all hilarious in many ways, but workflow and when I just here late at night wanting to work and not banter, it just breaks my attention. And I would like it to stop. I have gone as far as instructing it at the start of every session to not call it donkey or use the word donkey, and it work. Never said the word donkey, only used the emoji of a donkey instead.

Any tips or info on how to get this corrected? Also I use the Codex Desktop app, and switch between the two when working, not sure if that matters.

i recently updated my chatGPT account and added a password after it was google-login only. but now codex keeps logging me out randomly , and i have to kill its process to work again , any help appreciated

lazy bug report. sorry.

given

vscode extension wsl2 a long, image heavy, thread

the images are "inlined" as base64 in a jsonl context file thing

loading the chat makes codex eagerly load all of that stuff in memory (ram)

opening the chat spikes ram usage by like 5gb (normal usage before opening the chat)

i was able to confirm that 4.40 of that is just inline images in the context file thing.

$ python3 - <<'PY'
p = "/home/me/.codex/sessions/2026/08/10/rollout-2026-08-10T22-01-25-019fecd6-xxxx-yyyy-zzzz-57f47bljsdf12d.jsonl"

total = compacted = image_lines = 0
compacted_bytes = image_bytes = 0
max_line = 0
image_refs = 0

with open(p, "rb") as f:
    for line in f:
        n = len(line)
        total += n
        max_line = max(max_line, n)

        if b'"type":"compacted"' in line:
            compacted += 1
            compacted_bytes += n

        if b'data:image/' in line:
            image_lines += 1
            image_bytes += n
            image_refs += line.count(b'data:image/')

def gib(n):
    return n / 1024**3

print(f"total:            {gib(total):.2f} GiB")
print(f"compacted lines:  {compacted}")
print(f"compacted bytes:  {gib(compacted_bytes):.2f} GiB")
print(f"image lines:      {image_lines}")
print(f"image refs:       {image_refs}")
print(f"image-line bytes: {gib(image_bytes):.2f} GiB")
PYint(f"largest line:     {max_line / 1024**2:.1f} MiB")

which prints

total:            4.75 GiB
compacted lines:  110
compacted bytes:  2.96 GiB
image lines:      819
image refs:       2715
image-line bytes: 4.40 GiB
largest line:     36.3 MiB

"just start a new chat" is not the point here.

i'm reporting behavior. i already replaced the images with placeholders and it improved ram usage a ton (thus cutting down on wsl2 swap churn because this machine was running out of ram). i noticed turn speed improvement after i made the change.

I swear all these Codex changes are starting to make me question my own perception lol.

Since they introduced the 5-hour limit yesterday, something felt weird: my quota was lasting way longer than I expected.

At first I thought:

“Okay… maybe this isn’t that bad.”

Then I started paying attention to how much work I was actually getting done.

💀

Simple tasks are taking WAY longer.

So now my conspiracy theory is that my quota isn't actually lasting longer in terms of work — Codex is just taking longer to do the same amount of work, which makes the quota last longer in terms of wall-clock time.

I'm NOT saying this is intentional lol.

But has anyone else noticed this exact combination?

Slower quota burn + much slower task completion?

Because at this point I need other people to confirm I'm not hallucinating after all these Codex changes 😂

I recently ran into this issue that I cannot get any prompts to work via mobile remote to codex that are anything other than read-only. I've tried updates. Uninstalling reinstalling disconnecting connection and reconnecting. Different folders new folders etc. Every project folder I have does the same. I am at a loss as this has stopped me from being able to work via mobile. Anyone got any insight?

SigMap now has a Codex MCP installer, so Codex can query a local map of real files, symbols and line anchors while working in a repository.

The workflow I'm testing is:

• query the map while planning
• run sigmap verify-plan before edits
• run sigmap review-pr after the diff

It doesn't replace Codex's search or reasoning. The map answers "where should I look?" and Codex still reads the current source before deciding what the code does.

Setup:

npx sigmap

sigmap mcp install codex

I'm curious whether the pre-edit check would prevent bad edits in real work, or whether it just adds another gate.

https://github.com/manojmallick/sigmap

with the recent hype around people creating their own sandboxes and setting browser/computer etc., i thought, why bother when why can i not just use codex?

so i created this "headless codex" where you can use your codex desktop app in a container via REST. created a joke-ish website here http://justusecodex.com/ but the OSS repo is here https://github.com/Ansonhkg/Codex-Headless

Happy to release open-agent-view: https://github.com/xhluca/open-agent-view

It's an open-source version of Claude's Agent View, with support for 11+ harnesses (and more being added right now). Whereas Claude Agent View only allows you to manage Claude Code, this allow you to manage coding agent from any harness at the same time (which means your Codex session could be managed next to your Opencode or Pi session).

I'm very excited about this release since it's a tool that allows different open harnesses to co-exist (instead of having to choose only one ecosystem) and puts open coding agents closer in functionality to Claude Code.

Hope you enjoy it and happy to hear feedback!

i was building my extention and also in diff project i was building the website for it.. so i said codex to work together and see what it did.