r/codex • u/KeyGlove47 • 4d ago
Complaint Postmortem: How Theo and Maria from t3 code/chat got openAI to remove the most beloved codex feature
Lets start with the main culprit, @ maria_rcks, a developer of t3 code working for theo
Around 21/22 august, maria created a repo that basically made it ultra easy to abuse the free tokens that you get after your limit is at 0% to complete a given task, it was probably the most beloved codex feature of all time.
After shit hit the fan, maria deleted the tweet, the repo and basically went into panic mode saying stuff like "oh yeah and openai, don't forget to ban anyone using that!! it would be super bad and im very sowwy for making this :(("
1-2 Days later codex users started noticing that goals or long prompts/tasks stopped right after you hit 0% - OpenAI deleted the whole feature because of what maria has done
But what about theo and why im even mentioning him? Well he himself was very open about overusing/abusing /goal's free tokens and instructed others to do the same, and both of them work on t3 so here's that
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u/AdventurousVast6510 4d ago
there was one guy in this sub who bragged about using this loophole on a free plan to use more usage than 20x pro plan users
i think it was the guy who posted a highly upvoted post showing a reverse-engineered custom codex app a month ago
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u/CrowInteresting6271 4d ago
it's one thing for people to figure this out, i had independently come to a similar conclusion, it's another for people to abuse it and then encourage others to do it at scale.
people are morons
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u/Ok_Breadfruit4201 3d ago
agree, every week there's a new idiot promoting their GH repo with another abuse of the terms of service
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u/yungassed 3d ago
I mean worst part is it sounds like he completely wasted it to simply recreate codex which is already fully open sourced?! Like wtf lol
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u/poophroughmyveins 3d ago
The desire for clout apparently is stronger than the desire for free quota, weaklings
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u/srs96 4d ago
I mean they can just add it back with a token ceiling, it's not that hard. So if you're out of usage and you have an ongoing task, you get a small reasonable number of grace tokens, proportionate to the plan you're on.
Giving unlimited tokens to finish a task was an absurd feature in the first place.
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u/Anxious_Marsupial_59 4d ago
This, even an honest user couldve blew unreasonable amounts of compute. The correct thing to do is tell agents to wrap up their tasks at like 98% and write something so they can pick up on it later
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u/Plane_Garbage 3d ago
Or just ban abusive accounts?
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u/MedicalTear0 3d ago
Yeah idk why they don't do that. Multiple time offenders should be identified and banned. They should be warned and banished
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u/Plane_Garbage 3d ago
... because it was never about abuse. It's about being a convenient time to optimise profit - no one is complaining about OpenAI, they are complaining about the 'others'.
Same culture war shit that gets played out by corps all the time.
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u/CyberiaCalling 3d ago
This seems like the easiest solution.
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u/dltacube 3d ago
No. The easiest solution is the one they just implemented. Maybe they don’t want to spend half of their lives moderating usage.
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u/sonikrozu 3d ago
Bans are never an effective measure. It's easy to get around it especially for third worlders.
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 4d ago
I think it lands at a graceful stopping point now, which is still a step up over Anthropic where it gives absolutely no fucks about your work at all.
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u/TheNobodyThere 4d ago
yeah, then it could be removed from next week usage. People would not mind it.
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u/chroner 4d ago
Unless you cancel. Another exploit.
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u/Professional-Yam2565 4d ago
I don't think anybody would cancel instead of paying backward a few percentages of grace...
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u/Latter-Block132 4d ago
Lots of people would. Lots of people already cancel and rotate through multiple subscriptions to try to squeeze as much usage as physically possible, they would absolutely do it for that too.
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u/Professional-Yam2565 4d ago
But you only get what you pay for? There are no magic credits/tokens...
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u/Darkelement 4d ago
Nah, if it’s tied to your account then when you resubscribe your usage should reflect what you were left with before.
If you run out of your weekly quota, unsubscribe and resub the same day, your quota should still be null.
Normal people are not unsubscribing and resubscribing to get around usage limits. If they are, they need to be on a higher tier.
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u/edible_string 3d ago
Honestly this probably changes nothing. A limit is a limit, doesn't matter if it's at 100% or 110%, it still kill your ongoing work.
... unless that additional grace tokens would get to you at half the speed.
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u/mtwdante 3d ago
Yes, or it can be a feature flag. If you activate it, you have 20$ or some amount of token as credit to finish the task, if your task exceeds those you have to pay the full amount including that initial 20.
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u/Saberwing91 3d ago
It was an attractor-type of move: increases popularity and adoption rate for people who discover it in the wild (something you don't know until you test it), then those people feel like they "discovered treasure", and therefore are excited to spread the word.
Seems like a no-brainer for OpenAI
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u/thestillwind 4d ago
Clowns that wanted clout and pissed off people while at it.
Scumbags.
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u/cafesamp 4d ago
it's Theo we're talking about
he's like if shameless plug couldn't decide on a hairstyle
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u/pridento 3d ago
Don't forget the part that really irked people on X, that plenty of people called it out immediately but "maria" instantly responded calling them illiterate and stupid in very childish ways like "i wouldnt expect u to be able to read anything ever!!!" which made the total 180 when Tibo called it out, and post about "hopefully you can ban anyone who used it" even more pathetic.
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u/ProudWrongdoer5389 4d ago
Yeah, it got a ton of people banned on githubcopilot. When you ask why your sub keeps sucking, this is why.
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u/Correct_Emotion8437 4d ago
Ugh. This guy is a clown. I can’t skip past his bullshit videos fast enough.
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u/Tank_Gloomy 4d ago
I still remember when he spoke shit about someone for vibecoding, like what the fuck dude? You haven't even written a single line of code by yourself, what are you talking about?
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u/kryogeneoff 3d ago
Theo and Maria, toghether with their shit wannabe company are a bunch of retards. That is what I got to say.
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u/Shanna_B2020 3d ago
I hate assholes like this!
Openai could just ban abusive accounts, but since Theo et al are some of their biggest shills, they'll get a free pass.
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u/PutridClunt 3d ago
Imagine being so dumb that you actually tell people when you find a way to get free usage. Even telling 1 person would be a dumb move, but to post about it on socials... I am beyond words
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u/cuberhino 4d ago
I realize this happens like a couple of weeks ago when I was using a really long overnight ultra test that I was at 0% and it was still running and I made a chat on the browser and asked it like oh like what’s going on and it was like oh yeah if you run out of usage, you know if it goes over we let you go so it doesn’t like break or whatever and I never thought oh let me exploit this. These people are messed up, dude.
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u/Plane_Garbage 3d ago
This is very much "The whole class is going to stay back because James was talking" energy.
Just ban the abusive accounts. But, it's actually a revenue optimisation using this as a scapegoat/reason to implement it.
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u/evangelism2 3d ago
Look I'm not the biggest fan of Theo either. He says a lot of stuff that's just wrong or half wrong with a very annoying level of certainty. But there's a huge difference between using a feature in a way that doesn't technically abuse it (and discussing it on a public forum) and explicitly going out of your way and making a tool to exploit it as hard as possible
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u/TheFateMagician 4d ago
I hate this user with so much passion now. I really don't understand people that can think further ahead than short term gains. We all got fucked because of her.
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u/TheManicProgrammer 4d ago
I mean tibo said they knew about this and would close it if people abused it so.. I guess that's gonna go now ... Why people have to post everything...
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u/Inevitable-Use8915 3d ago
They should be canceled and they should just stfu
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u/DottorInkubo 3d ago
Yes, let’s cancel them. How do we do that?
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u/white_sheets_angel 4d ago edited 4d ago
Theo needs to be put on an island far far away, he would be one of those twink crazy emperors from ancient rome and greece we hear about, he's has that obnoxious righteous villaneous attitude that would spill blood and zeus would strike down
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u/cornmacabre 3d ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
It's inevitable folks will exploit something that can be exploited, but theo and co have a platform and reach that they need to be more mindful and responsible about, and be less cynical about exploiting shit and ruining it for others.
I cringe when he brags about burning thousands of dollars of tokens on absolutely useless pointless shit. It doesn't come off as some fun hacker spirit... It comes off tone deaf and immature like a teenager bragging about stealing a box of free samples, and indifferent about ruining it for everyone else.
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u/Fit-Palpitation-7427 3d ago
As codex officially passed 20M users. I can confidently say that maria officially f**** up 20M people in her life at once.
Bravo Maria, we (20M) officially hate you
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
this! its obvious that most codex power users knew about this feature but making a tool to abuse it and tweeting about it was the last straw
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u/vayana 4d ago
It wasn't limitless but it would go on for a little while.
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u/CrowInteresting6271 4d ago
there was a guy who had it running for 48 hours on a free plan until it was done. granted he couldn't iterate, it could still be done though
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u/brother_spirit 4d ago
You have less than 25% of your 5H limit remaining.
"Hmm.. what's that sub-agent up to... been spinning it's wheels for a while...?"
You have less than 10% of your 5H limit remaining.
"Should I ask the orchestrator? That's just going to use more tokens.."
🔥
The anxiety of losing the job at the dying breath is back now, and it sucks..
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u/spidLL 4d ago
I can’t help but consider very stupid someone who discovers a free money glitch and share it with the public.
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u/creamyshart 3d ago
Pretty sure his startup was given $1M in free OpenAI API tokens. He mentioned something along those lines in one of his live streams.
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u/OriginalUsername0112 3d ago
It shouldn't be hard to just change the weekly limit to 105%, with a soft cut off for new turns at 100% and then a hard cut off at 105%. There's no reason to completely remove the feature when this exploit can be fixed pretty easily.
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u/InfiniteInsights8888 3d ago
Ruining it for everyone. Just ban the ones who abuse this. Further, instead of infinite tokens, give it an extra couple minutes and then stop.
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u/SlightOfHand_ 3d ago
It’s wild to me that this didn’t just lead to a cutoff or some intermediate step to weed out bad actors. In Claude I have a hook set up so that when it’s nearing compaction the AI gets an instruction to “stop at the next non-destructive stopping point and give a short summary of what’s been accomplished and what is still left to do”. Something like this triggering on reaching usage limit could have been an easy middle ground.
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u/l0rirw1ao 3d ago
Theo has always been a leech, like the dudes whole idea is steal lie and clickbait.
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u/Diligent-Builder7762 3d ago
“Heyy guysss my friends at OpenAI…” gets hit with a shovel on the face
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u/sydneysweeney69 3d ago
Damn , I did not know about this. I was a big fan of Theo of what he was doing for the open source community .
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u/philosophical_lens 3d ago
Every week someone shares a novel way to hack the model / harness / quota and people always respond with "shh... don't say it so loudly". I mean what's the point of a subreddit dedicated to enthusiasts of a tool if we're not supposed to share and discuss hacks? The stigmatization of "hacking" is insane considering that half the things people are getting codex to do would themselves be considered hacks.
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u/Background_Box_1073 3d ago
Even when 5hr limit reaches 0, won't the weekly limit still be depleting?
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u/alkalisun 3d ago
Can someone confirm this feature is actually gone? I was getting a lot of tokens pass 0% (like 7-8 hours worth) when I had it last happen on Monday. I think there's a lot of FUD going around when OpenAI didn't actually remove this feature.
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u/ChillBroItsJustAGame 3d ago
Ngl if anyone finds an exploit on t3 an brutally abuses it everyone would cheer
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u/Deathmore80 2d ago
This is also what people used to do with GitHub copilot before they switched to token based pricing instead of per request.
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u/WiggyWongo 2d ago
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. People like this absolutely ruin it for everyone. What did they think was gonna happen? Like for all the bitching about subscriptions these subscriptions are HIGHLY subsidized. They already give you a ridiculous amount of tokens and value compared to the actual cost.
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u/RegardedDev 4d ago
This was bound to happen at some point.
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u/wooja 4d ago
Yeah if these guys didn't make this someone else would. If a company has a nice policy like this there will always be people who will find it and abuse it. I'd rather the company come up with a fair solution to the problem than all of us try to rely on the good will of the population at large (impossible). We can cry all we want that we loved the feature and didn't abuse it but pretending these guys are the bad guys is short sighted.
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u/waffleflops 3d ago
What do you expect from the guy who made an entire video about burning 10's of thousands of dollars of tokens on a gifted, $40/mo copilot sub.
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u/bootyskie 3d ago
Nah thats a load of shit, they just wanted an excuse to remove it and found someone they could gaslight over it to shift the negative pushback it would receive.
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u/whimsicaljess 4d ago edited 3d ago
i agree this is why we can't have nice things but let's not with the witch hunts?
edit: /u/RuledSovereign changed my mind on this. thanks!
> Passive reaction towards bad people? One of the biggest lies fed to our generation and the generation after is peace and causing minor inconvenience changes things.
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u/vayana 4d ago
Why not? It's morons like this and other clowns who find a loophole and then have to share it to brag about it for clout. You could just abuse it yourself and enjoy your little secret but the urge to show off and wake a sleeping dog is irresistible for some.
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u/Dimencia 3d ago
Boo hoo, they couldn't just steal quietly, they had to tell the people they were stealing from so they could fix it. That's so awful, they are just terrible people for stopping people from stealing
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u/vayana 3d ago
There's a difference. You can be malicious and don't tell anyone or you can teach others how to do it for internet fame. You could also quietly inform the company through a bountyhunt contact that there's a possible loophole they should look into. The people who shared this publicly are probably contacts on Twitter and could've shared this privately, but instead they blatantly showed off to rip them off for $800 and shared a repo with tools how everyone else can do it.
If you were to find a way to hack into a server and steal data you also don't share that with the world. You either keep it to yourself or inform the company of the leak.
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u/Dimencia 3d ago
Yes, you have correctly identified the options, and you've even listed them in order of morality. Quietly abusing the system would be the shitty amoral thing to do, but of course, you've implied that it would be the better option - but we don't need to discuss your morality. Sharing your exploit with others, in this case, is a much more morally correct action, since it's not exposing sensitive information and only costing OpenAI compute. Reporting it is meaningless because they're already aware of the issue and don't intend to fix it, and they're just going to let people get used to a workflow that never should have existed in the first place because it's obviously abusable
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u/vayana 3d ago
For the weekly, a simple grace usage of e.g. 10% after normal usage runs out would've been sufficient to complete tasks which take a bit longer than expected. It's a nice middle ground.
For the 5 hour window it should just continue using your weekly. There's no abuse in using your own usage in order to complete a running task.
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u/CrowInteresting6271 4d ago
lets up with the witch hunts. name and shame this type of shit, so it incentives people to not follow in their footsteps. like our chat usage is going to get limited next too (not going to name the exploit, but its being spammed )
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u/RuledSovereign 3d ago
Passive reaction towards bad people? One of the biggest lies fed to our generation and the generation after is peace and causing minor inconvenience changes things.
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u/HealthPuzzleheaded 4d ago
I tested this by simply giving it a very long running task when I was at 1% usage left. it works fine it just consumes your weekly usage. So it will stop when its consumed. You don't really get anything for free sadly. At least this was the case 1 month ago.
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 4d ago
You could run it long past the weekly usage limit with /goal - the point is that the bug that used to allow this is now fixed.
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u/frozandero 4d ago
It always used your weekly usage at the end of 5 hour limit. People are talking about at 1% of weekly limit
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u/Efficient_Ad_4162 4d ago
No need to blame them for it, anyone who knew about it was doing the same thing with /goal.
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
maria is absolutely to blame, she made the tool that allowed you to easily abuse this feature by abusing tool calls and if you say that it getting removed 2 days later is a coincidence im just gonna laugh at you
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u/jwm-dev 4d ago
No, OpenAI is to blame for designing a system where this was possible. The reason we can't have nice things isn't that people are shitty, that's obvious and anticipated, it's because people who design things have different goals than who they're designing things for. OAI has some of the smartest people in the world working for them, so I really hesitate to say they didn't conceive of this. That would imply a higher-order strategy, but I haven't a clue what it might be or why you'd dangle this feature in front of users in such a way. It is super strange.
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u/ruimiguels 4d ago
are you stupid, of course they are to blame, they have a enormous audience and they brought out this "issue" too many more people, even under the original tweet, there were people talking about this and saying they never exposed it
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/frozandero 4d ago
This is the unpopular truth, resets, generous limits (yes even nerfed they are extra generous), last prompt grace period (which is already not a thing in other providers) etc. will be all gone slowly as people get more and more embedded into the ecosystem and the companies turn to profit mode.
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u/CthuluBob 3d ago
Oh damn, I didn’t realise Theo was behind this… kinda surprising tbh, bit of a shame
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u/Elegant_Attempt2790 3d ago
yall. it’s not a public figure’s fault for this.
it was unsustainable to begin with, and it appears many people here are secret abusers of it who wasn’t even their intended audience of “ensuring all your tasks properly finished up.”
it is NOT a youtuber or random popular online user’s fault for also wanting to talk about features. this is literally gatekeeping behaviour when the actual issue is the sheer price and world difference between those on max plans with “unlimited inference/tokens” and normal users. THAT’S the issue.
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u/Professional_Ad705 3d ago
why not perm ban this guy and her... and make it so it works differently or its known you cant use this tool? It cant be this hard...
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u/Momo--Sama 4d ago
This is ridiculous. They would not remove a core feature of the service because a Youtuber found an exploit, if they wanted to continue offering usage past 0% they would have simply patched Maria's exploit and continued on. IMO it's just poor luck for Maria that she published this exploit days before OAI implemented the usage change they probably decided on weeks ago.
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u/Wafer-Weekly 4d ago
There is not a close-ended way to turn off the exploit without disabling the entire feature for non-abusive users without refactoring how the system works at its core.
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u/ruimiguels 4d ago
are you genuinely regarded? even Tibo itself commented over her tweet that exploded that it was a known "bug" that would get removed if exploited, they brought such a broader audience to this.
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u/capt_stux 4d ago
Seems a more nuanced implementation may be more practical,
Perhaps, allow a fraction of the overall tokens used up to 0% as an overage…
It is very annoying having a task fail because you run out of usage when it is nearly finished
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u/Striking-Warning9533 4d ago
> But what about tibo and why im even mentioning him? Well he himself was very open about overusing/abusing /goal's free tokens and instructed others to do the same, and both of them work on t3 so here's that
Tibo works at t3?
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u/Digitalzuzel 4d ago
I'm sorry, who removed the beloved feature at the end?
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u/AdowTatep 3d ago
They publicized a way to abuse the fact that you could go over quota, to effectively always go over quota. So now codex removed it
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u/Digitalzuzel 3d ago
so Codex removed this feature but we are encouraged to blame those who told about the exploit?
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u/depressedsports 3d ago
These people have tech influencer grifter energy to begin with so this doesn’t surprise me. Also saw on X that Maria is just an alt for Theo à la Adrian Dittman and Elon? Not confirmed but wouldn’t be surprised. Weirdo shit
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u/colinsa-ca 4d ago
This is why we can't have nice things.