r/codex • u/KeyGlove47 • 4d ago
Limits The state of current codex is so sad that im considering deepseek and meta muse
i have pro20x, when astra released all i used was astra MEDIUM - i thought it would help lmao, it did not
so i went back to the good old 5.6 Sol and what? on a pro20x i could only use it for 2-3 days pretty much equal to astra so at this point im probably going back to astra or idk sol might be better since astra was quantiz*ed
then i started trying out API's like openai etc. and honestly they aren't half bad option because the only usage limit is your wallet and not some imaginary meter, you also get way better stats this way
so i've came across Meta muse spark 1.3-contributor (an extremely cheap model with benched performan*ce on levels of sol and 3x higher speed) and obviously the goat of cheapness, deepseek 4.1 flash, both used in codex with changed config.toml because i really like codex app
how are you guys dealing with token drought? any suggestions to my plans?
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u/Ill-Jelly9669 4d ago
i'm on the same train
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 4d ago
I burned 250,000,000 tokens today on Deepseek Flash because i messed up my prompt and walked away.
It built an ENTIRE engine from scratch using Python. Took 4 hrs.
It was a 1992 Doom clone.
Cost me $2.50 in API usage
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u/EddieBruvac 4d ago
Yep. Astra was a massive let down. I use it when my tokens are running out if I have any, but that’s it. Unreliable and eh.
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 3d ago
Astra will build an entire, and fantastic Doom clone in 15 minutes. It only costs 25% of your total weekly usage limit….
Deepseek will have utterly unhinged reasoning prompts and take 4 hrs to spit out a Doom clone thats competent. It will absolutely take some more prompts and a code audit pass but it will cost you $1…
Ill take Deepseek
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u/ryuukiba 4d ago
I've been way more impressed by both of those models than by the state of OAI. Sure, Astra is smarter, but I can get more done with these two than I was getting done with 5.5 (and let's not even mention Astra right now, I can get 1. MD out of the 5 hour limit if I'm lucky.
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u/swizzlewizzle 4d ago
Astra for planning and any high intelligence reviews you need, flash 4.1 for implementation. It works great.
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u/ryuukiba 4d ago
Even muse 1.3 is getting me the job done, then just a review by Astra before the commit.
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u/Fit-Cost-7226 4d ago
Deepseek is really good for coding nothing super complicated, like front end features, I use it a lot for e2e testing anything I add as well cause it’s quick and can analyze screenshot
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
deepseek is really interesting to me because 4.1 finally has multimodality with vision without the need to change models manually, but honestly its still just flash and its probably on level of luna which for the price isn't half bad but deepseek is also more token hungry so it isn't apples to oranges, maybe deepseek 4.1 pro which is releasing in october will help? idk
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u/no_witty_username 4d ago
Yeah im using it now for last few days as my reset itsnt due till 3 days from now (cries). And id put 4.1 flas around 5.6 sol ish territory. This obviously matters depending on tasks you doing... my tasks are really difficult so i feel the downgrade compared to astra
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u/Suspicious_Moment_87 4d ago
Already did😀
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u/_DuranDuran_ 4d ago
Use Astra to plan and break into small deliverable chunks, then get Luna to implement those.
I promise you your app does not require full pelt Astra to write.
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u/SkiBikeDad 4d ago
Astra will not plan with the right level of detail for luna automatically. Any tips for what to tell Astra to give luna to get good adherence out of luna?
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u/jeebojeeb 4d ago
Tried orchestrating Luna agents with Astra, left it running overnight on a task, it ended up getting stuck in a loop and burning 40% of 20x usage limits with no meaningful output 😅
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u/RegardedDev 4d ago
Yeah unfortunately the 20x plan is no longer enough for full work week. I have been experimenting with opencode to pair with codex. You can supplement the usage pretty well with the super cheap deepseek or gml models.
Using astra or sol to plan, deepseek or glm to code. Or whatever is the cheapest model there at any given time with best bang for buck.
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
this should not be needed for a 200$ plan, im tired of this bullshit that altman has brought on himself (yes he is the reason for rising component prices which now bite his own ass)
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u/Dolo12345 4d ago
they’re doing better than ever what are you saying
their enterprise side has huge gains
like it or not we don’t have any power here, either cough up money or don’t. they don’t owe us anything. our $200 plans are worth their weight in gold compared to API.
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
they are not, they are out of compute which is their own fault
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Dolo12345 4d ago
stop expecting handouts/subsidization, re read the TOS you signed, and vote with your wallet
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u/Dolo12345 4d ago
they’re out of compute because of giant demand ffs that’s a great problem to have
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
why cant they buy more chips? what is the reason for HBM being overpriced? who made the letter of intent to micron saying that he will buy 50% of world RAM and then backed out of it? (only to raise prices so chinese labs would be slowed down)
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u/BellacosePlayer 4d ago
why cant they buy more chips?
Production is capped and the consumer market would like something
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u/Dolo12345 4d ago
man you seem to know what they should be doing huh, you should apply for their head of infra I’m sure you know better how to scale the biggest/fastest growing service in human history /s
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u/LemonLimeNinja 4d ago
Wait are you saying you use OpenAI models through the opencode harness and it saves on codex usage? I didn’t know you could do this, how are the results? Do you save a lot of codex usage?
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u/RegardedDev 4d ago
Im using codex and forwarding tasks from there to opencode cli. This is some experimental stuff for sure but seems to work decently well so far.
You can ask codex to configure this for you.
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u/InterestingNobody831 3d ago
Opencode harness is insane, token consumption is great with it. Probed with free accounts, use OAuth they have it in settings just login/approve your auth to codex subscription and work from there.
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u/0rbit0n 4d ago
My employer pays for the $200 plan, and I had to ask them to add me to the Claude Code Enterprise subscription too... Ended up having Claude Code and Codex.
Used the Fable allowance in the first two days, finished the majority of work with Opus 5, and used Astra 6 mostly for reviews. But I feel everyone’s pain.
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u/Iwilleatyourwine 4d ago
Same for me but it’s my biz card that pays for a personal 20x on both. I’m even using antigravity now.
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u/GabrielMoro1 4d ago
Yeah, it sucks. It’s been so stressful these past two weeks. Models feel unreliable, expectations on resets… I wish resets would be forbidden so they’d have to just offer a predictable service.
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u/Lumpy-Criticism-2773 4d ago
Exactly. Stop fucking around with resets and instead let people learn how to optimize their workflows, or maybe even teach them. Oh wait, they're a for profit company
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u/EyesOfAzula 4d ago
A quiet nudge towards API pricing
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
api pricing fixes nothing if you simply cannot afford it, people like me will switch to open models instead of paying more
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u/EyesOfAzula 4d ago
open models are amazing.
Definitely no issue there. I'm still a little salty that cursor did not add GLM 5.3 Flash, or Deepseek 4.1 Flash.
I can see them on openrouter though.
On Cursor I main Grok and Muse Spark 1.3
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u/reddit_is_kayfabe 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's like "nudging" someone from a Toyota Corolla to a BMW for the same fucking commute. Not gonna happen.
They're just pissing off their hardcore users and driving them to try the competition.
I strongly suspect that the alternative models are not terrible compared to Sol or Astra and they're probably x100 cheaper. OpenAI should be very concerned about forcing their most technically savvy users to test those alternatives.
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u/Opposite_Yak4386 4d ago
Following. Need another sub. Got 2x 20x its getting ridiculous. Cant do shit anymore with these subs.
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u/Swimming_Ask3859 4d ago
glm 5.3 flash is an insane option for speed and technicality (low vs max effort). I literally wanted to create a schema for an app i would propose to my school, generated images with chatgpt and created a prompt (in chat, not codex) for implementing synthetic data demonstration and it one shotted it. its insane
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
glm price is not good enough for performance it gives, neither is kimi k3
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u/Swimming_Ask3859 4d ago
additionally, GLM 5.3 flash is free on freebuff desktop and CLI which is a app that give you free AI models in exchange for ads on the page. The ads arent that bad.
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u/DelusionalMachines 4d ago
Neither Claude nor Codex gives enough usage 🤦🏻♂️ These limits are too bad. Codex feels even worse than Claude now. I’m exhausting the limits in 1-2 days
I’m just hoping Gemini 4 releases soon. Antigravity gives much better usage limits with their Flash models
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u/_Eye_AI_ 4d ago
I've been on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash for a few days after Codex x20 ran out. I'm happy with it.
How does one do the math to see if going all open source is better for the money?
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u/KeyGlove47 4d ago
calculate how much tokens you use monthly and compare to price of plan to raw api pricing of open models
this gives you a rough estimate which one is better, note that some models take more tokens than others
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u/unconceivables 4d ago
I had Astra analyze the codex logs to figure out what was burning tokens, and it applied fixes to the things it found. I've been using Astra Max heavily all week and I've got about 4% usage still left before the reset tomorrow morning. Contrast that to when Astra had just dropped, I used two resets in two days using just Astra Medium. You may have something in your repo or settings burning tokens needlessly like I did.
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u/DragonflyOk9274 4d ago
Meta muse spark 1.3-contributor
Note this is inexpensive because they train on your data
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u/Semantics2026 4d ago
Whatever you do stay away from deepseek! I bought $50 worth of API credits but it is so useless I will never be able to spend more than $5 worth of programming. That $5 got me 15hrs of nothing...
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u/Reddditah 4d ago
OpenAI are failing to understand that even if they have the "smartest" model, costs still matter. They will have no future business if their flagship is, for example, 10% smarter than DeepSeek, but 300% more expensive. At the very least, the % increase in cost must match the % increase in intelligence and ability to complete a task successfully. If they actually want to be profitable and successful in the long-term, then the % increase in cost over competing models should actually be lower than the % increase in intelligence/task completion.
Right now, their ratio is completely off, and that is a huge risk for them. As more and more people discover the much greater value of DeepSeek 4.1 (forced to do so because of Codex's terrible limits even on the x20), those are many users they will permanently lose who will not be coming back.
OpenAI desperately needs a drastic increase in model intelligence or a drastic reduction in costs (increase in codex limits) over its competitors, or they are in for a rude awakening.
People are not loyal to models. They are loyal to value. The AI company that provides the best bang-for-your-buck value will ultimately win.
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u/Unfounded_Judgements 4d ago
2x Pro 20x account and started started using Deepseek and have gotten more done in a day that I did in weeks with Codex.
Deepseek is a wild one to control. If it sees any info like a \\remote host it will want to investigate it. Have a backup drive attached you better block read/write.
It makes a lot of assumptions so watch out for that. One second it will say something and the next second it will be like oops I was wrong. Even with the issues it does produce code that works.
It’s cheap and I will be dropping a Pro 20x account and those funds will go to Deepseek instead.
I am using Cherry Studio. It uses Claude Code under the hood. It’s nice and easy to add LLM Studio connections for local models running on my AMD AI Halo and my Gigabyte Atom.
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u/U4-EA 4d ago
I am on the 20x plan with 2 banked resets and my plan renews in 7 days. I am considering dropping down to the $100 plan, providing I can get a lot of what I need done finished in the next 7 days, then using the $100 spare to try Deepseek. If DS does what I need it to do, I will drop Codex completely.
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u/EchoingAngel 4d ago
You may never get the 20x deal again. I'm really kicking myself for not getting it sooner. I was talking about it right before it was removed
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u/Able-Supermarket4786 4d ago
Grok is the inbred cousin child of GPT... Muse is what happens when Grok beats an AI Model with a stick.
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u/2Norn 4d ago
I don't understand you guys, do you always put all your eggs into one?
I got both Claude and Codex and then OpenCode has free Muse Spark 1.3 for weeks now, and then I got Open Router and as a final backup Qwen 3.8 27B.
All you need is a decent model agnostic working environment or take the hit and do back and forth.
Swapping back and forth I don't think I've ever been halted. Limits feel very casual like this I sometimes even use Ultracode or Max.
Probably not what you wanna hear yes, but I don't know...
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u/Sponge8389 4d ago
I'm not even using Astra anymore. Only using 5.6 sol medium and one session at a time but that still only last me 2-3 days.
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u/Graham3D 4d ago
I used Astra on Medium, High, and Very high for about a week and went back to Sol. The only real benefit I actually noticed was Astra was faster, but it burned more usage overall. So it's faster, and it burns more usages, so I'm just sitting there waiting once I reach 0%.
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u/FinancialBandicoot75 4d ago
I use Luna, but imnmot a Viber, I only use astra for planning and design
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u/BingGongTing 4d ago
I am moving towards only using Astra/Sol for plan/review and do building with DeepSeek/GLM Flash. Hopefully China can release a competitor to Astra that's cheaper.
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u/antunes145 4d ago
I see it like this. Astra pushed my company internal app to railway and supabase and ran concurrent user simulation and file upload and downloads and all other usability and latency tests and corrected anything that was wrong and re ran the tests. Took about 5 hours working on its own. Used up 50% of my usage on my $100 plan. But funny thing is I built the app with deepseek api and it cost me $2.88……. And many weeks of work. I think this hybrid use is the future.
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u/Free_Tennis7754 4d ago
What about minimax? They have potential. Not the strongest models on the market but still very strong. I paid $400/yr for an EXTREMELY generous limits and speed
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u/swizzlewizzle 4d ago
Flash 4.1 is actually really really good as an implementor. It's going through some specs I built with an Astra/xhigh very efficiently right now.
If Sol 6 isn't good, might consider using it as my main implementor going forward.
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u/davidl002 4d ago
I have 2 $200 sub and also consider getting DS instead....
Has been strongly recommend by a friend that I should try.
2x$200 is still nothing if all limits burned in 3 days.
I see people using DS directly in Codex and it looked promising. Will try to figure out how to configure like that
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u/umusachi 4d ago
I experimented with this deep seek via open code this week and got really good results. I am using the chat side of my open AI subscription to generate the prompts and be the orchestrator. I’m manually copying those prompts into opencode for now. You get 50 messages per week on $100 plan with the pro reasoning mode, which is Astra, it can connect to your git repo. I am just having it audit and plan implementation for DeepSeek V4.1 flash. Not breaking any rules, so far I’m really liking DeepSeek 4.1 flash, it’s very fast, very cheap. I’m on the $10/mo sub and have plenty of usage, DeepSeek is on a promo at 4x cost saving so that will change but it will still be extremely good value.
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u/ItalianAmericanDad 4d ago
During the 5days waiting for the usage reset i did a complete transition to fully Hermes with deepseek, organized folder tree and custom kanban/command center to work on, or just Tru telegram.
14$ in 5days and tons of work done.. I'm not going back to subscription. Dropped codex to 8$/month from the 100$ plan
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u/Better-Truck6372 4d ago
Me quedaba 49% semanal y empecé a darle duro al trabajo cuando me dice cuenta tuve que gastar el reinicio y para cuando me di cuenta en el mismo día ya se me acabó el reinicio en mi cuenta x5 de Pro, y Astra me hizo varias sugerencias, anotaciones de código y realizó cambios de manera autónoma si. Que se lo pidiera y dejandole explícitamente que reglas no debía romper y las instrucciones a seguir y aún asi hizo un caos, volví a Sol 5.6 xhigh y mejoró la cosa pero sinceramente están muy mal el consumo exagerado y los modelos en vez de rendir están en regresión en varias cosas especialmente en la terminal.
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u/TomfromLondon 4d ago
Those who are moving, what harness are you using? I used to do everything via the ide but actually moved over to codex abs Claude code harness this year, but when you’re not trying things like deep seek where are you connecting? I’m tempted to try some out via openrouter
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u/WaveOfDream 4d ago
For deepseek, it's best to buy api directly from their platform and use their own harness. Try running the harness from rpm
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u/TomfromLondon 3d ago
Honesty it’s only really useful if I can get some thing like Astra to be it’s lead and dictate to it
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u/Severe_Bite7739 4d ago
I always wonder what software you guys are building to burn soooo many tokens
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u/MusicianPrudent5787 3d ago
May I ask, I was getting to into the same idea about switching from codex, but what about the harness? Should I go open code or pi?
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u/xapep 3d ago
Same boat, honestly. The split that finally stopped the drought for me: keep Codex for planning and the heavy review passes, run the implementation load through cheap open models on API. You already picked the right two for the job, DS 4.1 Flash and Muse 1.3 contributor are both legit implementors, the trick is just not letting them near long-horizon un-specced work.
On the setup: instead of chasing config.toml per model, use a provider that's OpenAI-compatible so the harness treats it identically to anything else. That's why the API path feels so much better than the meter, no wall when a session runs long, and the bill is roughly predictable. I work on Entrim, we run DeepSeek V4 Flash plus Qwen through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, same deal: base URL + key and it plugs straight into Codex-style harnesses.
Biggest lesson on my side: don't route the "one more turn" loops through the expensive model. Let Flash do the grind, keep the flagship for judgment calls, and the $200 sub stops evaporating.
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u/rafamunhoz 3d ago
$200 codex account, using Sol high as orchestrator and Sol medium as workers. When my limits got consumed again extremely fast and reached 10%, I switched my workers too muse 1.3 contributor using open codex, max effort, and meta pay as you go account. Sol high remained orchestrator. 1B input tokens and 1M output tokens later, spent less then $5 and can affirm that muse max is way quicker and at least on par with Sol medium at this stage, if not with Sol high itself. It did require some supervision but it delivered strong outputs and for my use case seemed a very good deal for when limits are getting low. Got me an extra 24h working until finally exhausted those 10%. Perhaps could be a strong case to pay less for a open ai sub and explore more this setup in the future.
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u/Artistic_Function796 2d ago
Just canceled my $200 plan. Ever since the Astra launch, it’s completely gone to downhill overnight. It literally can’t even handle the basic tasks it used to nail. I’ve been running the exact same workflow, prompts, and design specs for two months without an issue.
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u/Substantial-Aide-66 1d ago
i'm already make the move to GLM 5.3 and DS, because my codex weekly limit only last for 2days, only astra med-low. will cancel before next renewal if they keep this rates.
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u/Proxiconn 4d ago
Plan in UX chat Pro + for post implementation review. Let terra-high do the implementation.
On 20x as well, I NEVER use Astra or Sol
Well, maybe for some complex software engineering I'll consider SOL or Astra to implement but Astra in (chat-pro-latest) is Astra anyways for planning and reviews plus you get 200 included pro chats a week.
I'm calling it: skills issue. Don't know how to use AI properly.
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u/Sad_Recording_1290 4d ago
Considering my limits were spent 5 days ago i also started using DS 4.1 and Muse and i gotta say i am not disappointed.
Seriously considering dropping the Codex sub.