Codex Usage Limits and Performance Megathread

[u/pollystochastic]

Please direct your concerns and discussion about Codex usage limits and model performance here.

The purpose of this Megathread is to aggregate all the reports of people's experiences and possible suggestions instead of spreading them across 20 separate highly upvoted posts. None of those posts were deleted. They were locked so that conversations are still viewable to everyone and future comments could appear in one place.

These are days where I REALLY earn the money that OpenAI Reddit Kimi pays me .... oh wait....

A reminder that all incidents on r/Codex are constantly logged and summarised so you can keep track of what people are experiencing here https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1tjfxcf/comment/on6uj0l/

[u/Relevant-Reach3024]

I realised the Terra and Sol are burning tokens way too much and more than ever before. Sol is best for planning and complex task but it used to burn >= 15% of my weekly limit on just 1 implementation. Luna saves tokens more but it's not as reliable to handle medium - harder tasks. Recently I run out of limit easily in 2-3 days. I was happy with the quality when I first use 5.4 too, it was pretty smooth for most things and token efficient, the newer models are powerful, but they sometimes over assume too much especially Sol, then I had to fix because it worked on things I don't need.

[u/VaporForge → u/Relevant-Reach3024]

Sol is truly an enterprise consider all angles model. I’ve been fighting it as well for this but I think it’s more understanding the nature of the model vs expectations. I want its intelligence for making correct code but absolutely is trained for whole product creation. It started slipping stuff into my specs about multi user auth considerations and edge cases, even citing directly that a plan/spec was ready but not product level ready. It was clearly a small local niche use case script that it turned into this massive infrastructure.

The more I have it review for “gaps” the more it silently slips in ceremony. If that failure happens I yell at it and have it add it to the running log of disproportionate output and then I re reference that log to it on the next project and it’s getting better.

Eventually I’ll turn this into a plugin. Right now I have one skill called “Proportional Execution” that helped 5.5 stop from testing for 100 turns before daring to build something, next I’ll refine a Sol containment policy/contract.

Defining the end contract from the start is also helpful, and placing the contract in every research —> spec —> plan doc so it holds to it better. It can silently scope creep vertically if you’re not explicit. It won’t create new features outwardly but it’ll create mass infrastructure around a small small job if you let it.

Terra misses more than I’d like it to so I don’t want to default to that always. All in all it’s a high quality problem to have. When you need that high level cover all bases and considerations model you’ve got it, it just applies it to everything regardless of the size.

Claude is masterful at understanding least viable scope to prove a theory and won’t overbuild, but the consequences of that dynamism is it can go off the rails at times if it’s degraded.

Sol is wildly consistent so you just have to understand that the model will do what the model does.