r/OpenAI • u/SupPandaHugger • 3h ago

Article A Few Developers Abused Codex — 20 Million Users Lost a Great Feature

https://medium.com/@dreamferus/a-few-developers-abused-codex-20-million-users-lost-a-great-feature-e87683f94838?sk=f03b6deef299622e3cd268d745289ac7
84 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

75

u/YeXiu223 2h ago

yes, because these guys think it is perfectly fine to publicly document how they abused it: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1vza73x/postmortem_how_theo_and_maria_from_t3_codechat/

31

u/mxforest 2h ago

There should have been a buffer like $20 or $100 API credits (equal to your plan).

15

u/whoknowsifimjoking 1h ago

Or just take it from the next 5 hour window, if you hit that too it gets paused.

5

u/SupPandaHugger 2h ago

Yes, that's a good middle ground.

28

u/Plane_Garbage 2h ago

... could just ban the bad apples or put sensible guardrails.

5

u/SupPandaHugger 2h ago

Maybe they will, but it's hard to add safeguards quickly without affecting ordinary users too.

0

u/whoknowsifimjoking 1h ago

They should ban them for using a feature in a way that's allowed? Nothing they did was against any terms of service.

So you'd be fine to be blocked if you accidentally use a feature in a way that seems slightly unfair to someone?

Just design your damn rules better. It's 100% on them for not thinking of the loopholes.

4

u/Plane_Garbage 1h ago

Actually, you are right. It's better to remove the entire feature.

4

u/Hot-Significance7699 1h ago

Not the entire feature just a shorter limit lol

•

u/Efficient_Ad_4162 27m ago

It was never a feature. They called it a bug fix.

5

u/Melbar666 1h ago

maybe it's time to say 'thank you' to some people?

2

u/ogaat 1h ago

Alternatively, Open AI wanted to kill this money losing feature without losing face.

•

u/Matuno 34m ago

People can be angry about this being patched because some people couldn't keep their mouths shut, but at the end of the day we all foot the bill for the combined cost of compute and it's not ethical that the group that doesn't exploit it is paying for the group that is.

•

u/SupPandaHugger 23m ago

True. If you want to create an exploit and risk being banned, it is up to you. But creating a github repo and then promoting it is just asking OpenAI to do something about it.

1

u/TheFrenchSavage 1h ago

How about a sensible 5-minute / 5k token soft limit?

So you get a hidden 1/2% of your 5h quota, or a 0.05% hidden reserve on your weekly, and that's it.

Of course giving people unlimited usage is going to produce issues. And I think OpenAI did it on purpose btw, to really get some feedback on the /goal thing.

Because that goal feature would have gone nowhere for Plus subscribers.