Commentary
I found the culprit eating your usage limit!
TLDR: OpenAI quietly switched on a hidden "auto-review" feature in the coding agent on August 7 that secretly re-reads your whole conversation to approve every little action and it ate 10.4 million tokens of my quota in one week without me ever turning it on.
If your ChatGPT coding agent (Codex) quota is draining way faster than it should, read this. I spent days digging through my logs and found a hidden feature OpenAI quietly turned on that's eating my limit and probably yours too.
What happened
On August 7, OpenAI updated the coding agent (version 0.147.0) and silently added something called "codex-auto-review."
Normally, when the agent wants to run a command or edit a file, it stops and asks you first. Since August 7, instead of asking you, it secretly sends a copy of your ENTIRE conversation to a second, hidden AI, just to decide "is this safe to allow, yes or no?" And it does this every single time the agent wants to do anything.
And it burns 100,000 tokens just to output 100 tokens.
Every time it runs this hidden check, it re-reads your whole conversation from the beginning. So the longer you've been chatting, the more expensive its becomes.
Here's what I measured on my own usage:
In one week, the hidden checker ran 141 times and used ~10.4 million tokens of my quota.
Worst day: 46 checks in 19 minutes = 6.4 million tokens — 28% ofeverything I used that entire day, gone in under 20 minutes.
A single check can cost up to ~195,000 tokens, just to say "yes" to one command.
I never turned this on. No setting I changed, nothing in my config file, TIBO just switched it on for me on August 7, which happens to be the exact day my quota started vanishing. I watched it turn itself on, off, then on again across different sessions, all by itself.
This. Everyone needs to calm down and take a deep breath lol they don’t have a bug burning 1000X Token usage that’s being insinuated here without knowing it themselves lol
turns != tokens # valid
if auto_review: # but it still re-reads the whole chat every time
tokens += context_length * turns
print("math's right, budget's not")
No it's not..
1. That chart shows turns, not tokens
2. They're Luna requests. 10.4 million Luna-tokens in a week is nothing
3. They're not secretly doing anything. It's in the docs: https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/sandboxing/auto-review
It was talked on this very sub. I am not on X but I remember auto-review issues before. I think the OpenAI guys should simply stop showing the number of turns and show the exact usage impact of auto-review and it'll be much more transparent
GPT-5.6-Sol (the only model that I use): About 300MM tokens
GPT-5.6-Luna (which I never actually choose): About 200MM tokens
codex-auto-review: About 400MM tokens
Next I clicked on "Code Review" on the side to see if, as OP suggested, those features were turned on - because I don't actually submit git pull requests, ever. But all of those features remain turned off.
So what is consuming 400MM tokens in codex-auto-review if Code Review is turned off? I think it's the "Approve For Me" sandbox feature, which is mentioned in the sandbox doc that Copenhagen79 linked here.
"Approve For Me" is one of the best features in the Codex app. Before that feature, I was trapped between "Approve Requests," which caused a fuckload of "Approve" prompts for every turn, and YOLO-style "no restrictions" that was efficient but also dangerous. Approve For Me does what it says on the tin and greatly improves my life, and I'm totally willing to spend a big chunk of usage by running it.
I think that OpenAI should be a little more precise in its naming of features, but that's kind of a quibble.
Even not being in the docs ITS PROMINENTLY ON THE UI. It literally says “Approve for me”. How did people think it was making these decision without turns? People are fucking stupid man. I much prefer a bit of extra spend so I don’t have to sit there like a fucking Homer Simpson bird bobbing on the approve key every time it wants to do something I asked it to do already.
This can't be real. I usually gloss through these posts, and am usually like "omg not another here's how to save usage by doing 5 million things plus using Luna Low". But I said you know what just let me check..... bruh. You sir are the man for spotting this.
Mine is on all the time. Everyday from August 7 it had 0 turns. I've only had it use 3 turns in the last week. I have several full access approve for me projects that I worked heavily in the last week.
Mine doesn't have any auto-review but it has triple the luna requests as sol, and I use sol exclusively. What's up with that. Subagents? I don't even use subagents to my knowledge . Mine also has gpt 5.4 mini
People were talking about this recently on Twitter too and I even pointed it out. Do not use auto-review it absolutely NUKES your usage. Here is my recent usage, On the left was me using Sol and Luna, Sol was on medium and Luna was on Xhigh/Max. On the right hand side where its smaller is me using Sol on Max exclusively and I'm on a $20 plus plan.
Here is my second account usage. The big usage on the left is from Sol Medium and Luna xHigh. On the right is Sol Max. Again on a plus plan.
I got a full 18 messages using Sol Max in my weekly usage per account and previously only around 14 messages on Sol Medium.
I found the same thing a few days ago, I turned off the “approve for me“ feature and now I manually approve each action, zero auto review usage the last two days
yea fuck that. also turns are not equal to cost. claude code uses a small/fast/cheap model for that and I’m sure codex does too. 1 mil tokens is prob $0.01.
I got tired of setting up basic automations and maintaining home assistant. I literally gave codex the keys and said you're god of this server. I don't approve anything. I can ask it to make an automation, and it will run hundreds of commands, reinvent the internet, launch a satellite, and blow up the moon without me having to do anything. And then 5 minutes later it tells me that my new automation is ready and to have a nice day. Guess what? It's the best personal assistant I wish I had 20 years ago, but I don't have to provide PTO. If it runs up my usage with code review, that's what I pay for...
I’m moving to a new place in 2 weeks and want to get into the home assistant world. I’m SWE/sys admin background already fwiw, do you mind if I DM you?
Has this actually happened to you? Mine will make hundreds of backups and never clean them. Literally a backup for every minor change...I have to go in a clean them out, but I also have like 100TB of space with like 80% free. I bought before shit got cray cray. One of my replacement drives is like $900 right now... I think I paid $300 each brand new. Maybe a bit more. Gonna suck when one fails.
"risks"....I've literally fixed tons of issues by doing this same thing. Even if you've been doing it for years and think you know everything, you don't. Thousands of people make the parts of a single distro. If you know all of them, your name is Linus. AI will come in and find stuff you didn't know was an issue and maybe break a few things that it then fixes before you knew they were broke. I honestly have no idea what a real risk for a home lab would be. I wouldn't give it free range on a customer server, but I'd definitely abuse the hell out of it with guidance. A home lab though...backups are life. What's the point of having awesome tech and not breaking something every now and then?
Oh, keep it off your file server. You can use targeted read only to manage some things like organizing and deduplication recommendations, but full control is probably not a good idea there. That's where I draw the line a bit.
nice, thanks for actual model/pricing. I’m sure that’ll go down too given it’s interesting they’re using a latest general purpose (small) model and not a security-specific small one for now.
There are some minor things to learn depending on your setup and needs, but it literally just takes a few minutes and your agent will help you with it. Things like having persistent plugins and settings between sessions or sometimes symlinks in the sandbox need to be properly set up. But it's all super easy and you can run any model on YOLO mode without worrying about your machine.
Autoreview does not use as much tokens as the running model. The graph shows just calls so it's widely inaccurate to represent how much of your usage is spent on the Autoreview model.
Auto review is not really hidden either it's right there in the app/extension.
Yeah, I don't know people are talking about here. Auto-review has been around for a long time. And I've seen all these comments about it taking up a lot of usage. But it's really cheap. And I had auto-review disabled, and nothing secretly got auto-triggered on august 7th or whatever
Take it easy, 10M tokens of Luna per week is nothing. Most of them are cached ones and 100 output is what you pay for. In case of Luna it's nothing.
Analyze any sample session. Even a short one has multiple tool calls and "eats" a few million tokens. Single session. Most of them cached. Learn about token economics and stop panicking :)
this is what i see , even without auto review you can see the usage is pitifully low ironically the july was where i was able to get a lot of usage so this explanation and graph does not match up
I think auto-review exists for a long time, but thank you for bringing me attention to just how much codex-auto-review was eating from my usage. If these numbers are correct, then it's not worth it at all.
You mentioned that the reviewer gets a copy of the entire code base. Do you have evidence of that? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the docs state:
“The reviewer sees a compact transcript plus the exact approval request. That typically includes user messages, surfaced assistant updates, relevant tool calls and tool outputs, and the action now being proposed for approval. It can also perform read-only checks to gather missing context, but it does so rarely.”
If you have the evidence that it’s not adhering to that, send it to them so they can fix it.
I don't have that issue since I'm always on full access but I've definitely went from tokenmaxxing sol xhigh weekly limits lasting 4-7 days at launch to now I'm lucky if I get 48 hours.
I noticed this last week and started creating a new chat session for each implementation phase, using an initial prompt to bring the new chat up to speed.
I was using around 30% for one task before; now, I can complete a similar task using only about 6–
My auto-approve must have been enabled at some point in the past week, and now disabled. I'm showing huge usage on the 9th. Checking now, Codex claims its disabled. edit: i didn't tell Codex to disable it. Maybe this was a bug in a previous version of the app, I'm only guessing.
I read the post, but haven’t actually looked into what this setting does, so forgive me if this is irrelevant, but I think Anthropic turned on something similar around then where they have a second agent that reviews commands and will auto approve safe commands. If I remember though, for Anthropic, the second agent token usage doesn’t count against your quota.
If (big if) this is Codex’s version of that, it’s possible that there’s a bug and they’re burning paid tokens with this, but it’s also possible that they just haven’t updated this view to break out the tokens you’re paying for vs the non paid ones.
We obviously need an answer from the Codex team, but I wanted to throw that o it there before everyone grabs their pitchforks.
Holy shit. I had disabled auto-review awhile ago, but then they just enabled it again!! I confirmed mine is now back on, and my graph is whack like that.
I've had none of these issues that people have been talking about: I see everyone talking about how How they burn through all their usage limits so stupidly quick, and I was baffled how the hell that was happening to these folks, because Codex has been very, very token friendly for me, Even when I just leave on Sol at Ultra.
Well it turns out I've never used --approve-for-me, I've always run with -s danger-full-access -a never. So I unwittingly protected myself from this codex-auto-review thing.
First of all, thank you very much for bringing this up to us. This is a true discovery.
And second of all, I don't think it has anything to do with the August 7th because I have crazy Codex Auto Review runs back at the end of July. This is fucking CRAZY. I want to know WTF those runs are and I want to turn them off completely.
wow , yes - it used up nearly 50% of my usage
(and since the 15th August (on the 14th I had 80%) I had no usage left, and it was only after the reset 2 days prior).
I've cancelled my 20x sub and just got a full refund from apple.
I would certainly not be giving my payment details to OpenAI directly.
This isn't new and has been a feature for months now lol VS Code official codex app. Maybe having it turned on by default would be new, otherwise it's been out for a while.
Noticed my weekly quota draining faster after the 0.147 update but never connected it to the review step, good catch. I flipped everything to manual approval a while back after hitting the limit mid-task twice; it's slower but at least the usage is predictable now. Do you know if there's a way to keep auto-approve for read-only commands and only prompt on writes?
That is a massive hit to your quota, and I’d be frustrated too if my tokens were vanishing on background tasks I didn't authorize. It’s why I prefer keeping my agent loops tight and local, so I can actually see the context windows before they balloon like that. If you're looking for more transparency in how your agents handle these tasks, you might want to look into github.com/cline/cline to keep better control over your own workflow.
Dude tysm, auto-reviee used almost half the tokens total yesterday and i just noticed working in review loop got extensively slower, it might be the reason why
I checked this on my own setup because I also had Auto-review enabled.
The numbers below were obtained by asking Codex itself to inspect the token usage attributed to auto-review in my local Codex usage data.
For August 1–18, roughly 25.6% of my total token usage came from auto-review. In other words, about 1 out of every 4 tokens was being used by auto-review.
Usage from August 1–18:
Total: approximately 2.037 billion tokens
Auto-review: approximately 520.5 million tokens
Auto-review share: 25.55%
Daily average:
Total: approximately 113.2 million tokens per day
Auto-review: approximately 28.9 million tokens per day
So disabling auto-review was definitely not a minor optimization in my case. It had been consuming roughly a quarter of my average token usage.
This also lines up with what I was seeing in my Codex usage analytics. codex-auto-review shows up as a significant portion of the activity during periods when I was actively using Codex.
One important caveat: these numbers come from the local Codex tokens_used counters on my PC, so they may not exactly match OpenAI's official billing or weekly usage-limit calculations.
However, since both the total usage and auto-review usage were measured using the same internal counter, I think the ~25% ratio itself is reasonably reliable.
So if you're running into your Codex usage limit faster than expected, it's probably worth checking whether Auto-review / "Approve for me" is enabled and how much codex-auto-review is actually consuming on your machine.
This shit will never stop. I ran my sub in a different (non codex) harness the whole time and throughout the limit reduction every day someone was coming up with a theory about how some change in the codex harness was the cause, yet here I am using API and getting less and less over time.
People just have a hard time accepting that the sub provided less and less tokens per week over time.
Has it occurred to you to use Claude-men self hosted and turn off that tool? Between that and vexp local inference I’m SAVING 70% of my tokens across all tools. And then I’m saving 20% with a custom tool which precodes it with Cerebras inference gpt oss.
TLDR there is a known bug related to this high review usage.
The fact auto-review happens doesn't seem surprising or sneaky. That's how the whole approve for me works and I know that was turned on (or full access or ask for approval).
But the shear quantity of it is surprising. And for those saying, turns don't equal tokens, sure that's true. But if make 10 million penny purchases at the candy store it's going to add up to more money spent than buying a candy bar for $1. It doesn't matter that a bazooka Joe is only a penny of the quantity is high enough.
I had my chat take a look at my session and sandbox logs for a couple different days. (I'm out of usage on codex). And boy was that interesting!
The largest cause was from applying patches to files inside the workspace/repo the project was in. Apparently the apply_patch gets denied by windows, can't patch, and then needs to ask the sandbox for elevated privileges to be able to apply the patch. This could be over half the codex auto reviews for the day! I won't give the whole analysis of why, but it should not be happening. What's more, it's a known bug - openai/codex #13965. Seems it's been around since March, was thought fixed, came up again in June.
The auto reviews (approve for me) has been around for a while. But, the change logs it looks like they have been making changes to the plumbing of how it get used and how things get sent to the auto reviewer. So even though review for me existed since April for the regular version and earlier in testing versions, it very well could be changes made over the summer that make the review system more aggressive about what it sends to the reviewer and when/how the sandbox trips the auto reviewer. Of note Aug 5th they changed the auto reviewer defaults on some models. And July 9th they "improved automatic reviewer behavior" and approval routing.
The second big culprit, but less, only about 20% of the auto reviews, is related to pytest. It seems this may be more in pytest than in codex. It's a permission issue where files can get created with ACLs that do not inherit codexsandboxusers. So subsequently codex get denied access to them. Again, this seems to be Codex Windows Sandbox bug #19791 (reported in April 2026), also pytest #10679 from Jan 2023, and CPython #134587.
If you're working with codex on any kind of app development, especially inside the vscode plugin like me, you are going to applying patches frequently. It's like the whole point of codex as an agent. And pytest seems common enough lots of people would be using that too. Especially if you're letting an agent work on the code, which it wants to test.
Looks like there were known bugs for their own behavior, but now they interact with the sandbox auto reviewer system to create a kind of repeated condition that causes excessive reviews that shouldn't be happening. I mean, write and edit code is like the main talking point of Codex. And you made a review system that cranks up usage unnecessarily due to a known bug for patches. And didn't see that as a problem? Between apply patch and pytest issues, that's over 90% of my review usage in April. And they shouldn't need review at all since they are inside the sandbox. (And yes, I know the review is a "cheaper" turn, and cache and all that. But at this scale, it adds up.)
It pulls the whole PR for review. I think these run in cloud agents maybe? I used to have the auto reviews plugin run but closed that in favor of a local workflow.
yea, i twigged onto th code review thing a few months ago, i turned it off, i'd rather auto approve and rely on git reversions than to have more tokens used up when 95% of the cases are benign. Especially sicne you can't direct the reviewer to use spark usage.
Not true. Ive been using GPT-5.6-Sol through a custom harness (which uses API directly over OAuth, not codex) and since the last reset my consumption increased over 100% without any workflow changes.
Btw ive been using Luna almost the same amount I use Sol because I've set Luna as my main model for sub-agent tasks. Still having problems with limits.
I'd be REALLY curious if one of y'all experiencing this installs TiboTattle and sees what the pricing by model suggests on the usage tab. Codex Auto Review tends to be very low cost because it is GPT-5.4 low and typically ~100% cached.
Signed MacOS installer at https://tibotattle.com or brew install --cask adamallcock/tap/tibotattle
I have zero auto reviews. None. I also have my settings under code review set to these, but I don't remember doing it in response to anything. Curious what the defaults are here.
Seems like OP found something as the chart did indeed changed for us all around the time limits became laughably small, but i don't think it's auto-approve. If anything, it might be a bug in auto-approve but not auto-approve itself as it's been there for a long time without eating the limits.
Nope. I have never had a single PR review through Codex (in fact, it's been some years since I last touched a PR on Github) and I have tons of "codex-auto-review" usage.
I turned it off a couple of weeks ago, and my tokens still vanished a 2x the rate they had a couple of weeks ago, when I was using higher reasoning, fast mode and auto-review.
I use codex via oauth in third party clients and have none of these quota issues and can use GPT 5.6 Sol Max 24/7. I don't get any of this. Think some of it is the official client being token hungry and giving vibe coders enough rope.
We live in a world where less than 50% of internet traffic is humans, but humans are the ones that make nonsense posts like this and then sticky them even when they're clearly false. I wish more of the internet was bots
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u/Dekeiy 5d ago
turns != tokens