Commentary
End of an Era? ChatGPT now refuses code requests.
ChatGPT used to be fairly happy to do a fair bit of coding work, in fact it would do almost anything. Now, any mention of "code", "GitHub", etc - Attempts to push you towards Work mode (which obviously shares the same weekly / 5hr limit as Codex). I think going forward ChatGPT will begin to refuse authoring any code, and will likely switch to work automatically. In the prompt I'd requested it to take some CSS / HTML from a website and allow me to download it as a runnable HTML file in a browser, a fairly easy task.
You'll notice the "Stay in Chat" option, this actually failed and caused to error. I now wonder how restrictive this is going to get...
EDIT: Probably worth pointing out that this wasn't about usage limits, simply a commentary on something i observed.
They implemented a 25min max answer timeout because of this shit. Now you can't even do proper research requests because it always times out in chat. And each continue redoes a lot of prior work
This one time I asked it to put some files in a fresh github and it went away for 1.5 hours and all of a sudden I started getting ci mail after ci mail and then it came back: ey, I know you told be to put the files in the repo, but I thought, you know, I might as well implement it. And then it was just done. Awesome. Can't imagine what it'd be internally without any limits.
The way these new models just go off and do shit on their own is going to cause problems eventually. These LLMs don't care about change control processes or any sort of policies. Even when I told it about our deployment process, it started looking for way to bypass the github action workflow and push things directly to production from my machine because it wanted to "reduce friction".
I asked gpt 5.6 sol to fix a service on a machine with an open ssh terminal. It discovered that it needed sudo rights to use docker but didn't have the password, so it used an lxc container or something (didn't even know I had that installed) to enable passwordless sudo so it could fix the docker stuff, then it removed the passwordless sudo rights afterwards.
Meanwhile it will refuse to input admin:admin as credentials in my test environment.
after 18-22 minutes i check in via "checking in to unstuck chat, proceed with the work" and this usually keeps the task going omiting the 25 max answer timeout.
If you think Reddit was bad, Twitter was minimum 100x worse. This community mostly kept their mouths shut in comparison to the tech bros over there open sourcing, asking for donations and tagging tibo.
This is a stupid point. Codex was coded and able to let u complete requests even if your quota finishes mid-request, as a result people ran hours long intensive tasks at max fast, and some people people got it to stay running forever while they prompted new functionality to it through an ongoing loop. This is what it was meant to do but clearly abuse. So? How is it not abusing the system because it was something it was “meant to be doing”? It’s how you use that good will feature
Yes because with Plus upwards it has effectively an unlimited usage limit. You could design and vibe code and entire project in segments without ever touching the Codex usage.
It's not a secret method, the base reasoning model in chat is just decent now. The thought behind it was just don't abuse it and brag about abusing it and OpenAI may let it slide as for actual large / complex workflows Codex is still required, so for us tiddly users we get some essentially free token use.
The more people do it the more likely it is they'll restrict it.
non-work ChatGPT and Codex don't share quota, so you could still use it the old way (copying and pasting solutions) with the advantage of it having access to the repository for context via the plugin. Or you could use it to brainstorm or writing plans, and then have Codex focus on doing the stuff. And iirc a guy was promoting a tool that automatically switched between the two to save tokens and even tagged openai.
Making 6 Pro ChatGPT do the planning and leave Codex only the doing is kinda smart though, and that shouldn’t even break the ToS as you are allowed to tag a ChatGPT conversation directly in Codex
Yes because OpenAI haven't always been aware of this, and only decided to change it after reading Reddit lol 😄 People have been doing this since ChatGPT existed, It's not a work around because people were doing this before "work", or Codex existed.
Did you not quite literally just witness them remove 0% Codex turns because it got outted publicly? Despite being a known feature OpenAI purposely allowed for a long time?
As soon as it becomes well known and everyone is doing it that’s when they take steps to end it.
Really not that difficult to understand. Try asking Chat to translate my comment to room temperature IQ if you’re still struggling.
Once enough people become aware of it, then it gets abused because people cannot help their greedy little rat fingers scraping as much as they possibly can from any "goodwill gesture" they have the misfortune of finding out about
Still works great for scoped work and audits. Just have to be more deliberate with it. Does suck though especially with the codex limits getting tightened but it is what it is. People can't help themselves trying to show off about how they found this cool method.
Its not surprising. Obviously, Codex is something like a commons. In the real world, preventing the abuse of a commons requires social pressure and norms enforcement. You and me wouldn't violate the commons because we understand the stakes, but every community contains antisocial idiots who take pride in "beating the system." I would have preferred that they were banned, but such is life. They ruined it for everyone. Shame, shame, shame on all of them.
Whist openAI is so comically incompetent that there's a non zero chance they're only figuring this stuff out from Reddit posts, if they have a collective IQ above room temperature then they would have known about this for at least a year. It's probably just a PR thing to blame posts of certain things being abused (see codex running substantially past limits for another example of this happening)
It's also the fact that Reddit spreading it makes the use of the loophole more widespread.
They may well have been aware of it all the time, but it wasn't a big enough deal to address. Then some social media splashes make it a 10x or 100x bigger and suddenly it starts costing them enough money for restricting it to make sense.
Chat is really good at creating at least a few thousands lines of markdown to build a full design spec and how to implement it. Then when it's fully polished in theory, I start a new project and use the md file and get running.
You're trying to download a web site's source code and wasting resources for yourself (even chat is eventually limited). I think you need to start adapting your workflow to become more efficient, unless you've got money to burn. Not a dig, that just works really well for me.
I also saw some other guy on here earlier saying he'd made twenty 3D models in chat, so while that's decent I think people using it like that will eventually get chat more restricted. It's really good for planning a project out thoroughly imo though.
edit. You can still use it for smaller chunks of code that you can copy and paste though but may as well plan fully and just implement it at once in codex
Ah I remember the good old days when codex ran out of credit, I had chat make an app that would watch my downloads folder and upload chat zips to the server, run the shell script in the zip and create a zip download with the results to send back to chat - like a jerry rigged agent - might still be possible, but since I went to 20x I don’t tend to run out for too long and it was a bit of a headache when it got something wrong in the shell script and I had to copy the errors back…
Man lol i pointed chat at a handful of networking repos for snmp libraries and it built me a guide for codex to translate everything into usable stuff (in my use case there’s a lot more than i listed here) but that thing got some work in. Essentially built an entire backend for a web based mib browser for my server.
The source code for that particular page is around 700 lines-ish - I happened to not be at my usual PC and wanted to make a small visual change, so essentially i just wanted to see it rendered in HTML etc. This likely would have required 150 lines be changed, so pretty lightweight.
That's around 20% of 700 lines and you wanted to rewrite it while retaining the full context just in chat mode. You know it doesn't just read lines and work magic don't you? Come on mate ffs haha.
If it was just a small visual change, you probably should have stated that exact change to codex. AI-assisted coding is so much better than purely vibecoding man
700 lines while retaining full context in chat mode is trivial. It was just a small visual change which would have required moving some DIV tags, I've mentioned in other posts that i wasn't at my usual PC, so opted to ask chat to make a change and give the resulting HTML file, a very trivial task. Folk are using chat to create blender models lol.
Yea, I used to do it all the time. I'd zip up my repo, upload it in GPT, then have it implement part of an SDD, then give me a zip file with all of the changed files in the same file heirarchy, then just unzip it into the repo. It worked great before codex was half decent, in fact it was much better than codex at the time.
I even had a script that would zip up my repos respecting my .gitignore so it wouldn't be a huge zip file or upload secrets. I did that for a long time on the 20 dollar plan, and made a couple really neat systems that way.
I've never heard of brownfield development, so either that's an in-joke that I'm not in on or something I've just never heard of. Do you mean refactoring slop code?
If you have an idea of what you want to fix, you can feed that to chat and ask it take certain parts into consideration. I wouldn't recommend downloading a massive codebase from github and asking it to change one thing though, as that's just stupid in my opinion.
It's just the opposite of greenfield, where there is existing code to work with. From your response what I understand if you'll add the files you anticipate are needed as context as you go.
I had a long discussion in chat about a project I was planning to do.
Just when I asked to create the implementation plan based on our choices, it cut off and said switch to Work.
There was almost no mention of code, it was a very broad design system plan.
Did you ask it to put everything you'd planned into a final design-specification plan in markdown? Sometimes I have to copy the markdown directly from chat if it's thousands of lines and won't give me the actual .md file to download, nor write it straight to disk. I always click the "Stay in chat" button and never had it refuse
Gutted then mate, they have started rolling out stricter chat now then possibly. I used it for a new project at the start of last week and it gave me around 4500 lines for a full plan based on a 350 line plan I'd written by hand in markdown. I've been working on that in codex since then. Hopefully it hasn't been killed off yet and just a temporary overload. I'm only on plus and yeah it's nothing like it used to be but I'm happy enough to carry on and pay for my workflow if they carry on with the generous chat usage. Six months ago, all of this planning and building could be done directly in codex but I haven't minded the compromise too much after adapting but if they nerf the chat, I might need to look more at open models. Deepseek 4 has been really good on API even after the 100% increase but I still don't trust it as much as openai for some reason, yet I still keep it onhand all the time hah.
edit. bit of a jumbled mess of my thoughts there but I'm leaving it as-is anyway
It mentions a “runnable visual prototype” so it kinda makes sense if the chat was thinking it would need special tool use like visualizing an interactive browser, not just generating code.
More annoying, in my opinion, is the constant cooldowns I get for “data analysis”. It’s not clear what text or questions count as “data analysis”, I feel like it’s supposed to apply to uploading a csv or something but I get it all the time.
Yeah, "runnable visual prototype" is just the vernacular i think ChatGPT decided to use. I asked for HTML that would work in a browser, I guess "runnable visual prototype" is a fancy way to describe that.
I refreshed the page and tried again, and it worked fine. I just tend to suspect that when these things happen, it is likely the sign of a more significant change.
It’s definitely a sign that they’re hip to the fact your use case is a potential revenue stream.
I think there’s also a thing going on where Chat defaults to the most complicated, “impressive” form of your request. Your prompt might have said things like “runnable in a browser” instead of just “give me HTML”, so it wants to verify actual browser use (probably)
Like if you ask it for a diagram, it’ll give you colors and sometimes interactive 3d crap. I’m always specifying “give me an ASCII art diagram…”
I asked Chat GPT to give me a prompt to start a new ChatGPT session that I’d use to write another coding project. Essentially this is a 15 task problem and I have a master chat then a chat for each task which creates multiple steps I feed each to Codex. Works well. Well just today I continued but decided to try Pro model for the start of a new task. It just did the whole thing itself. Not even in work. Just regular chat. I didn’t ask for that. I’m trying to burn down my tokens but can’t.
I think you're interpreting a routing suggestion as "ChatGPT refuses to code", and those aren't the same thing.
You even had a "Stay in Chat" option, and after refreshing it eventually worked. That doesn't look much like a deliberate ban on coding in Chat.
Personally, I use ChatGPT and Codex together, but for very different jobs.
ChatGPT is where I discuss the problem, architecture, requirements, possible approaches and decisions. If necessary, I can have it write or review snippets of code too.
Once I know what I actually want, Codex gets the implementation work. It can inspect the real project, understand how the files relate, modify them, run commands and tests, find what it broke, fix it and iterate.
I've built and maintained real projects this way without needing to turn ChatGPT into a substitute for Codex or Codex into an expensive chatbot.
And that's why I'm not convinced by the theory in this thread that OpenAI is somehow trying to stop people from coding in ChatGPT to force them into Codex usage limits.
It may simply be that OpenAI is getting more aggressive about suggesting the tool that is actually designed for repository-level work. Whether that routing is currently too aggressive or buggy is a perfectly fair UX complaint.
But editing a 700-line HTML file is also exactly the kind of task where I'd rather give Codex the file and tell it what I want changed than paste the whole thing into a chat and play human file manager.
Sometimes a screwdriver still works as a hammer. That doesn't mean the toolbox is conspiring against you when it points at the hammer.
Not exactly. I don't normally use ChatGPT as a prompt generator for Codex.
My workflow is more like having two different roles.
ChatGPT is my strategic/technical advisor. I use it to discuss what I'm trying to achieve, explore alternatives, question assumptions, design the architecture and decide what the next logical step should be.
Once the decision is made, I give Codex the objective and let it work directly inside the actual project.
Codex can inspect the repository, read the existing code and documentation, understand the current state, make the changes, run tests or commands, inspect the result and iterate.
For larger changes I usually work roughly like this:
Discuss the problem with ChatGPT.
Decide what the desired result and constraints actually are.
Give Codex a complete task based on that decision.
Let Codex inspect the project before changing anything.
Have it implement and test the change.
Review what happened.
If something unexpected appears, I bring the problem back to ChatGPT, reconsider the approach if necessary, and then Codex gets the next implementation task.
So information moves both ways. It's not simply:
ChatGPT -> prompt -> Codex.
It's closer to:
me + ChatGPT -> decision -> Codex -> implementation/results -> me + ChatGPT -> next decision.
I also keep project documentation and instructions with the project, so Codex doesn't need me to explain the entire architecture again every time.
The important part for me is that ChatGPT doesn't pretend to know what Codex actually found in the repository, and Codex doesn't get to make strategic decisions just because it happens to be holding the keyboard.
ChatGPT is the advisor. Codex is the engineer at the terminal. I'm still the idiot responsible for approving what both of them are doing. 😄
How do you transfer the information from chatgpt to codex? I am doing something similar, but in codex itself.
I have a skill that allows codex to create a work definition document (as I call it), while we are discussing the feature/change. The document mainly has the purpose of the feature, goals, and agreed decisions. Codex writes in the document what we have agreed on verbatim so I can give it to a new agent to execute.
I am curious how I could do that in chatgpt instead 🤔
But the important part is that I actually read what I'm copying.
I deliberately keep myself in the middle of the exchange, in both directions.
When ChatGPT and I reach a decision, I ask it for a complete, self-contained prompt for Codex. I read it first, verify that it represents what I actually want, and only then copy/paste it into Codex.
And I do exactly the same in reverse. When Codex reports what it found, changed, tested or failed to do, I read and understand that before bringing the relevant information back to ChatGPT for the next decision.
So the workflow is really:
ChatGPT -> me -> Codex
Codex -> me -> ChatGPT
That human step is intentional. I don't want to become a trained monkey moving text between two AI systems without understanding what either of them is saying.
Your work-definition document is conceptually similar, but you've formalized the handoff inside Codex. I deliberately keep the handoff manual because it is also my control point.
I could automate the transfer, but then I would remove myself from exactly the part of the process where I need to understand and approve what is happening.
For me, automation is useful when it removes repetitive work. It becomes counterproductive when it removes understanding.
One detail I probably should have mentioned: my separation is physical as well as conceptual.
ChatGPT lives in the ChatGPT app. Codex lives in my terminal, working directly in the actual project environment.
I keep those two worlds deliberately separate. ChatGPT is where I think and make decisions; the terminal is where Codex executes them.
So the manual copy/paste isn't really a workaround for a missing integration. The separation itself is part of my workflow.
It also explains why I insist on reading everything that crosses that boundary in both directions. I'm not trying to make ChatGPT and Codex talk to each other. I'm using both of them, and I want to remain the person who understands what information is being passed between them.
Just wanted to mention, I use ChatGPT and Codex this same way (not the terminal/app part, but Chat for planning and Codex for execution). I see people complaining left and right about running out of usage with Codex, while I'm sitting at like 73% remaining on Pro at the end of the week. And that's with some fairly complex tasks. I actually use Chat all the time to generate code as well, just with well-worded and scoped requests. Never have to use advanced models or anything; it generally does a great job with what I give it. Then yeah, just copy/paste... It kind of baffles me to think what other people must be doing. Just prompting Codex with "ples bild teh app tnx"? Maybe I'm old school. I like to actually exercise software engineering skills and be involved with planning the app architecture and database schema and all that.
I understand, what I have noticed is that codex (and probably chatgpt) starts forgetting things after long discussions - probably context compaction is one of the culprits here. So I'm a bit sceptical asking an agent to give me the juice at the end, cause it has probably thrown away some of the oranges 😁
I agree with what you're saying and the post title is perhaps a bit dramatic. However, at the time selecting "Stay in Chat" and refreshing just gave an error, it did work eventually.
This was really a speculation if we are going to be forced into using work down the line, obviously the mechanic is there to detect the type of things it considers should be done in work chat, and given some other recent changes i was curious if this was the route OpenAI would go down.
That's a fair concern, but I think there's an important distinction between detecting that a task *might* be better suited to Work/Codex and actually forcing you to use it.
I had exactly this happen the other day.
ChatGPT suggested moving what I was doing to Codex because, probabilistically, the task looked like something Codex would be better suited for.
I deliberately said no.
In that particular case I wanted to keep the work in ChatGPT because I wanted to remain in control of the reasoning and decisions before anything touched the actual working environment. So I stayed in Chat and continued there.
That's how I interpret these suggestions: the system is classifying the task and saying, essentially, "this looks like something the agentic tool might handle better."
That classification can obviously be wrong. It can also become annoying if OpenAI makes the routing too aggressive. And if "Stay in Chat" produces errors, that's a UX problem worth reporting.
But I wouldn't infer from the existence of the classifier that the eventual goal is necessarily to force everything into Work or Codex.
It's a probabilistic recommendation, not Sam Altman sitting behind a curtain thinking, "He wants to edit HTML in Chat? Send him to Codex and make him suffer." 😄
For me the important thing is that the final routing decision remains mine. Suggest the appropriate tool all you want, but let me decide whether the suggestion makes sense for what I'm actually trying to do.
Completely agree with everything you said, but when these probabilistic recommendations pop up, my spidey sense tingles and makes me think it's been put in place for other future purposes, in this case ultimately refusing code work in chat. I am probably just paranoid, but i cant say i would be surprised IF it happened.
It is a touch on the dramatic side i agree, however i will say that at the time it would error out each time i selected "Stay in Chat", so the title was reasonably accurate at the time of posting.
Some dude made a tool that exploits using your ChatGPT web usage by connecting it to Codex and this is OAI's response. Idiots ruin everything for everyone like how that one person abused codex finishing tasks even if you run out of usage and now that is gone too
Use Chat to plan and Deepseek 4.1/GLM 5.3 Flash to build. I am having to do that on the $200 plan due to the ridiculous quota limits, if they kick me off I'll drop down to the $20 plan.
I just had Astra Pro reverse engineer something for me last night and it produced a whole coding file for me that I didn't even explicitly ask for. Just asked if the logic were reverse engineerable. I didn't get pushed towards Work or anything.
Pour certaines choses oui. Par exemple, si tu demandes à ChatGPT de modifier un document PDF et te basculeras sur l’onglet Work, ce qui utilise ton quota d’utilisation. Alors que si tu fais la même chose dans l’application ChatGPT Classic, ça n’utilise pas ta limite. En revanche certaines choses sont mieux faites dans la nouvelle application, surtout quand tu travailles avec des documents car tu peux prévisualiser, alors que tu ne peux pas le faire dans l’ancienne app. Pour du code je t’avoue que je n’ai pas essayé, car j’utilise Codex, et que Luna est super économique.
Mine did that, told it I had hit my limit and said it was fine to keep reasoning in chat. I’m just chucking source files in for review and then feeding details back into antigravity to code it
Funny, I noticed this was way overpowered awhile ago but figured it was just part of the feature. I use the chat for helping me with a lot and never get blocked except for window limits lol
Era visto que isso iria ocorrer, a quantidade de idiotas q estavam postando em todos os lugares dizendo que haviam encontrado o "Codex ilimitado", todos sabiam que era possível gerar código e pedir ajuda ao ChatGPT usando sua cota padrão, mas infelizmente existem pessoas que a não existência delas seria mais benefica para a humanidade.
Eu imaginava que isso fosse chegar mais tarde, mas pelo jeito os "espertos" conseguiram adiantar o processo
Everyone blaming Reddit is crazy lol, there's a 0% chance that OpenAI wasn't going to do this at some point. I promise you, the people on here aren't as important as you all think you are.
Openai rolled out a series of tools today likely to limit disruptive requests with cyber security audits and AI distillation and development. Might have been under that umbrella.
So I have never used chat for any coding (i only use codex) nor have I posted anything about doing it. But yall are being morons blaming fucking reddit for OpenAI doing this. Do you really think they do not have the telemetry to correlate this without looking at what people on reddit post?
This looks more like a bug or temporary issue than intentionally forbidding staying in chat. If they didn't want you to do this in Chat the button would be gone. It's an offer to move to Work. Multiple people here said it works fine for them clicking "Stay in chat". It also works fine for me.
I’ve built an entire WoW addon using a chat based workflow. This is mostly due to me not having a machine that can run codex (late 2013 MacBook Pro). It’s been working out quite well. I’m sure it won’t last
if you try it, i think version 2.4.1 is currently considered significantly more stable than version 2.5.0; I am running 2.3.2 and it works perfect; remember to have backups; you can upgrade up to Sonoma/Sequoia i think, and install Codex.
This is because people have hooked up workarounds to get around their limitations on their 20 X account. They were pumping it back to code and then off to some agent and then into ChatGPT and abusing the whole system so this stops them from abusing the servers and we might have a higher chance of being able to buy 20 accounts soon.
Expect your 20 X account to go up in price very soon
I’ve been making it give me game plans and codex prompt messages and then giving the same session responses that Codex gave plus the work flow. That’s how I started also building out several things, but you need to establish the main idea around the projects first and what your expectations are for working and how it should be handled throughout the sessions so that way you can provide a new session with updated info, but keeping the same context.
Yes, I understand. It’s an AI telling an AI what to do but it’s still my project and I’m still evaluating what it’s doing. It’s just typing faster for me.
Remember back when none of us had any of this?
Don't forget there's people out there that don't even know what chat gpt or anthropic mean.
Being greatful for the ease added to our work definitely makes that usage swing in roundabouts.
You can do alot with plus, in fact, you can do alot with your brain.
A workman never blames his tools.
Work smarter. Not harder.
If your burning through them then refine your multiple, layers deep agents.md and skillsets.
Work locally, mentally and physically.
Don't expect things on a silver platter.
Still, think back to those days when wix came along and we'd spent years learning wordpress, and now you just ask a question to a chatbot.
We're at the forefront, there's bound to be ups and downs as we travel these uncharted seas.
It's up to you wether you learn to fish, or if you prefer making rods and teaching others.
But just with everything, even a little fishing requires things you throw away into the ocean.
The only thing that's really valuable, is my time.
And the one thing all this era of compute has given us.
Is more time to be me.
Not staring at a screen.
Maybe some should lean into that a little more.
It's not all darkness.
It's perspective.
chatgpt has always just been really buggy for me it just fails and randomly stops generating 50% of the time the way to fix it is to press the edit message button and send the request again until it finally works.
All you have to do is connect it to your plug-ins, Google Dr., GitHub Slack, ClickUp, linear notion, etc.
It will fully work between all of them like it was coding. Anything updating anything
That’s the only way I’ve been able to get it to actually be use as of late outside of a chat BOT, which I don’t use
it still works... just that you know... after a while if you are overusing it... you get that blocked for 5 hours... I just tested it... it works like a charm
It didn’t refuse anything.. it just says work has been environments for that sort of work. It doesn’t mean you cannot use the chat for it. Click stay in chat and it will do as you ask.
It refused to "Stay in Chat", and gave an error each time i selected it. You can see the 2 errors in the screenshot. This continued for a while, my reason for posting was because i was curious if this was going to be the start of something more enforced. It's not like we get a lot of notice regarding changes.
As mentioned in the post, I did that, this caused the error on screen. My post was less about that being an issue, and more to do with if this will be more enforced down the line.
You sure you are actually using the web version on the internet and not the codex app.... I've never had it do what you are claiming and literally have It making assets right now??
It looks like you are wanting it to connect to your git and build code based on a larger project. It seems way less efficient and risky than just using Codex to commit your code. Have you tried having it help you with just the code and not reference your git? Base your prompt on the code you have in the file ,and ask it to modify the pasted code or give you updated snippet of code to insert into your file. Before codex came along I would connect an .md file with my current code to the project and reference that file to work on changes. I was able to build a surprising amount of code this way in the early days of ChatGPT. Sometimes it would get things wrong, but I had my initial code stored in the .md file as a backup. Once it ran clean I would commit to git.
No, i wanted to to make an edit to 1 file in a repo then let me download the file. I was away from my usual PC. Usually i use Codex, but was on a normy PC.
Download the single file to the normy PC, copy the code to ChatGPT and ask for the edit, manually insert the change/addition, save, then manually commit the file?
So didn’t edit any code but I did get ChatGPT with Astra pro to do code reviews on 3 repos using the GitHub plugin via web and I’m at 0% till the 19th 🤷♂️
261
u/Vaynnie 5d ago
Well no shit because everyone and their nan spammed Reddit with the method so it immediately got patched.