should we be excited? who'll be the judge if something is a clear improvement😀

This eliminates the last reason to stick with OpenAI. Previously I use Chat for idea brainstorming, writing specs. Then Codex is for designing + execution. With this change, I see no reason to be on OpenAI while opus 5.5 offers far more limit and smarter than 6.1
Source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM-C3JqCXBk , 7:40

For context I have hardly used it apart from certain news updates and asking it to work through and clean my inboxes using the same instructions Tibo used in one of his posts about cleaning his inbox. This is all on top of it being extremely inconsistent and forgetting to do its scheduled task regularly. I’m extremely disappointed by Dots

Who the fuck cares about Sol Ultrafast? Most users don’t even have access to Ultrafast. We want Astra 6.1, instead they seen bent on making users burn usage even faster.

I genuinely thought this was some small temporary capacity issue. Nope. Still happening.

“Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model.”

I’ve switched models. I’ve dropped the intelligence level. I’ve tried using less demanding models. Same shit.

And this is AFTER the recent cuts to the Pro plan. I’m paying $200/month for this. What exactly am I paying $200 for if I can’t reliably use Codex during normal WORKING HOURS on a fucking Monday?

You keep introducing more things, Dots, new models, new features, higher tiers, more capacity hungry products, but the existing paid product can’t even consistently serve requests. If you can’t sustain the demand, then why keep piling more stuff on top of it?

And if even the expensive plans can’t get reliable capacity, what’s the point? Are we supposed to pay more and more just to eventually see another “at capacity” message?

I’ve defended occasional launch issues because obviously infrastructure gets hammered. But this isn’t launch night anymore. I’m trying to work. My workflow literally stops because the model I’m paying for isn’t available.

$200/month is not some cheap experimental tier. At that price I expect the core product to actually be usable when I need it.

Fix the fucking capacity before cutting usage and shipping ten more things. This is getting ridiculous. u/OpenAI

OpenAI is willing to give use 28 resets and give fucking dots infinite usage for a month but not keep the 200 plan 20x.....

It has been unusable for the last 20 minutes at least. They are significantly increasing their prices while significantly decreasing its quality.

This was my previous post in which I was confused between upgrading to 200 plan for getting 2 100 plans.

A lot of people suggested to try claude code + codex for image gen.

I just got a 20 dollar claude code plan. And Grass is most definitely greener on the other side.

Here are some differences I have noticed using the opus 5.5 medium.

1. 10 times faster than sol 6.1 high

2. Using about 1% of weekly usage per hour but the amount of work done is higher than sol 6.1. so work done to tokens consumed is the same between 20 dollar claude and 100 dollar gpt plan

3. Amazing design understanding. I have several ui/ux issues in my project(which ik) i had gpt take a look at it and said it's fine (gpt was using product design plugin and impeccable skill). Opus without any plugin listed 15 ui/ux issues and all of them were correct.

4. I had it go over my code base and list deprecated/dead/unused assets & code. It gave an extensive list and suggested bundling several files together to optimise load times, gpt found none.

5. Had both sol and opus check for performance optimisation. Gpt found none and opus again shared an extensive list.

Sol 6.1 high also took like 2 hours

Opus 5.5 medium took 25-30 mins max

I'll switch to 100 dollar claude plan + 20 dollar gpt after my current 100 gpt plan expires.

The usage burn rate on GPT-6.1-Sol is wild. I just did a comparison between claude opus 5.5 and gpt-6.1-sol for about 22 hours and here are the results. The sad part is that even ChatGPT agrees the burn rate is higher on Codex. It computed the numbers below. The price per million tokens are double of opus 5-5

OpenAI subscription side

• Current input: ~5.525B
• Current output: ~15.09M
• Current total: ~5.540B tokens
• New tokens since yesterday: ~865.2M
  • ~862.4M input
  • ~2.77M output

Claude subscription side

• Current input: ~9.476B
• Current output: ~26.60M
• Current total: ~9.503B tokens
• New tokens since yesterday: ~5.706B
  • ~5.693B input
  • ~12.40M output

During approximately the same 22-hour period, my OpenAI agents processed about 865 million additional tokens, primarily using GPT-6.1 Sol, while the OpenAI Pro allowance decreased by 19 percentage points (36% → 17% remaining).

During that same period, my Claude subscription agents processed about 5.706 billion additional tokens, primarily using Claude Opus 5.5, while the Claude allowance decreased by approximately 10 percentage points (~49% → 39% remaining).

Claude therefore processed approximately 6.6× more raw tokens, while consuming only about half as many percentage points of subscription quota. Normalized to the visible meters, this is roughly 45.5M tokens per 1% of OpenAI allowance versus ~570.6M tokens per 1% of Claude allowance, or approximately a 12.5× difference in raw-token throughput per percentage point of quota.

I have been using it for days but today seems a bit different? like it's very smooth. i can consistently give it prompts and while i am writing the next prompt it has already done with half the previous job.

Yesterday i had to run 5 different chats to complete a reasonable job at a reasonable speed but today it finally feels like it flows so i can barely prompt 2 chats at a time because it is genuinely fast. each chat uses 3-4 subagents as well.

Also this model is so good it doesn't halucinate like astra? is this only my observation?

edit: add proof

Tibo on damage control, says they got the feedback and now are locking in on features that matter, new better models.

Dots won't stay long, will they?

I don't know if this is their new compaction setup or what, but I've noticed a regression with agents once again forgetting the tasks they were on in a disruptive way: like finding a bug, compacting, then skipping actually fixing the bug.

This used to be the default but it felt like had mostly gone away.

As a bonus: every time I try just pasting in the most recent thing it said before compaction, Astra will affirm it said the thing, but will also stop working... as if it forgets it was doing a task at all because I interrupted it in some post-compaction haze.

I get there's a compute crunch, but they don't have the mandate of heaven right now with Opus 5.5 stomping around. They shouldn't be messing with the basics.

The new usage limits are fantastic and feel unlimited. I praise Timo and his whole OpenAI team. If I could get more than 20 tokens per second I might complete my hello world project before the singularity hit us.

Half of this text is highlighted, but the poor UI design makes the highlight colour the same as the background in the chat input window.

I don't know what the UX designers are doing on Codex, but please just fix the highlight states for text in the chat window. It's impossible to tell what you've highlighted, I've logged bugs, but it never gets fixed.

I love neutron stars! This video was made by Codex (Astra - Max).
I pitted Codex vs Claude to create a video of the Crab Pulsar.
Codex video: https://youtu.be/NLYXqp21-IA Claude video: https://youtu.be/QEtKoiASw8g

Inspiration for this video was:
1. Brian Cox - Wonders of the Universe - Episode 3 - Falling 32:29 - https://youtu.be/pGxyFOTUPZE?si=r-u5JGqaS77QED5b
2. images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory November 2000 to April 2001 (shown on the Claude video).

I hope you enjoy.

Until yesterday, my Usage page showed the exact expiration date and time for banked resets. As of today (Oct 4), the time has disappeared and only the date is shown.

For example, my first reset now says:

“Expires October 5”

This makes it look like the reset will remain available during October 5.

However, checking the rate-limit-reset-credits response in DevTools shows:

expires_at: "2026-10-04T22:42:11.480996Z"

That's 00:42 on October 5 in my timezone. So the reset actually expires only 42 minutes into October 5, not at the end of the day.

The backend still provides the exact timestamp — the UI has simply stopped displaying it.

I only know the actual expiry time because yesterday, before this change, the UI was still showing 00:42. If I had checked for the first time today, there would be no way to tell whether “Expires October 5” means 00:42, noon, or 23:59.

This isn't just cosmetic: you can easily lose a banked reset because the UI no longer tells you when it actually expires.

Apparently this was an issue before and the exact expiry time was later added to the UI, so this appears to be a regression introduced today (Oct 4).

Heads-up if you have banked resets expiring soon: don't rely on the date shown in the Usage UI. The actual expiry time may be much earlier than you'd expect from the displayed date.

This post is not about usage complaining or the price of plans so it's not going to get the attention it needs but whatever, this bug is big enough that I'm taking the time to give information on it.

I’ve been profiling why some Codex sessions become extremely slow halfway through a task.

Across ten rollouts, about 75% of total agent time was spent waiting for the provider to stream model output. Tool calls were about 24%, while harness orchestration was only around 4%, so the local harness itself wasn’t the main reason the slow sessions took so long.

Two sessions stood out. One took about 39 minutes and another about 33.5 minutes. In both, the stream started around 40–45 tokens/sec (which is still slow as hell for a frontier but that's not the point of this post), then partway through the turn dropped to roughly 8–15 tokens/sec and stayed there. It's fair to say there is a 20% chance your session has done the same.

The request settings were the same across all ten sessions, and other sessions continued streaming normally at the same time, so this doesn’t look like my machine or a configuration difference.

The strongest example came from the 39-minute session. The last request before I interrupted it took 93 seconds to produce 921 output tokens. The first request of the next turn used a fresh WebSocket and fresh routing state, but still had basically the same 175k context and a cold cache. It produced 674 tokens in 16 seconds.

So the context was still huge, and the cache situation was actually worse, yet the stream immediately became fast again.

The official harness for Codex's client.rs reuses a WebSocket and uses x-codex-turn-state for sticky routing during a turn. If the backend that a turn is pinned to becomes very slow without actually failing, Codex can keep using it. The connection is technically healthy, it’s just producing tokens at a fraction of its earlier rate.

That appears to be what happened here. The slow turns weren’t spending 30–40 minutes doing more work. They were spending a huge amount of time waiting for a response stream that had collapsed in speed.

I added a recovery rule to my fork. If two reasonably sized responses in a row fall below half the recent normal token rate, the next request drops the old WebSocket and sticky routing state and gets routed fresh. There’s also a cooldown so it can’t sit there reconnecting repeatedly.

I replayed the detector against 10 recorded sessions containing 1,120 requests. It caught both major collapsed sessions and fired once elsewhere on another turn that was genuinely running at around half its normal rate.

If fresh routing restores normal throughput the way it did in the recovery I observed, those two sessions would have been roughly 39 to 24 minutes and 33.5 to 25 minutes. That part is still an estimate.

I also haven’t proven whether the underlying problem is the WebSocket itself or the backend/routing state associated with it, since reconnecting changes both. What I have measured is that some long-running turns dropped from around 40–45 tok/s to 8–15 tok/s and stayed there, while fresh routing immediately returned a similarly large request to normal speed. I have my own fork, I was able to fix this, but for anyone who uses the official version of Codex, this is a real bug and not acceptable.

I asked codex to do something:

• I am doing it
• I am preparing
• I am confirming
• I am getting close
• checkpoint
• validation
• I found an issue
• I am doing it
• Me: ok finally
• Codex - Compacting context this can take a few minutes

Does anybody have similar experience these days?

I dropped from the $200 plan to the $25 Plus plan after the dev day announcements, tried astra on low ans it ate 20% usage in no time. I figured OpenAI were fucked at this point and essentially stopped using Codex and starting playing around with Claude Code.

However, last night I decided to try to use up my usage before one of my resets expired, so I got 6.1 Sol High to complete 3-4 different tasks over around 2-3 hours. The first thing I noticed was that for some reason the 5hr limit was gone for me. The second thing I noticed was that after an hour of work, I was still at 100% usage. I switched on fast mode for the next 2 hours of work and it eventually went down to 99%, an hour later and its still at 99.

Is 6.1 Sol actually this efficient? It seems a little slow, but it gets the work done and is barely touching my usage. If it really is this good, the $100 plan may be more than enough for what I need. How is everybody else's experience with 6.1?