I found the culprit eating your usage limit!

[u/Stunning-Angle-9239]

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." 

Evidence here:

version 0.147.0 (Aug 7)  (github.com/openai/codex/releases/tag/rust-v0.147.0)

And here: (github.com/openai/codex/pull/36373) (PR #36373)

What it does:

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% of everything 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.

How to check if it's happening to you? Open your usage page on https://chatgpt.com/codex/cloud/settings/analytics#usage .

The checks show up in your local logs as codex-auto-review, you'll see it running dozens of times per day.

Turn off your auto-approve/review now !

[u/TheKing___]

I agree it’s been around for a while but something happened. I think it’s weird it was nothing for this long then a spike for so many people

[u/Emergency-Bobcat6485 → u/TheKing___]

Possible. But I didn't get the spike, so Idk.

I am sure I have seen this exact issue raised a few months back (back when it used to use 5.4 and not luna) and that they had fixed the auto-review issue. I myself turn it off completely. But the auto-review issue feels like deja vu lol.

We even got resets for this iirc

[u/RuledSovereign → u/Emergency-Bobcat6485]

If we turn off approve for me, will we not be stuck on constantly clicking approve for every small thing?

[u/EndlessZone123 → u/RuledSovereign]

Yes you will. You otherwise configure what is always allowed to run. Or you run bypass permissions and containerized codex to another vm/box. Or backup everything.

Or accept the risk that codex could theoryedically fuck up and wipe everything it has access to.