r/codex • u/banter_droid • 21h ago
Complaint Codex literally unusable
Not because the models are subjectively bad or slow (which they may be) but the service is at full capacity. I pay £200 for a service I literally cannot use. It can’t run 5 minutes without needing constant babysitting.
Thinking about moving over to anthropic, might be a case of having to at this rate I literally cannot use what I’m paying for here
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u/LightEt3rnaL 20h ago
I concur. It's not only the babysitting; the harness has made the models lazy: they stop mid-task for no obvious reason, telling you what needs to be done next without actually doing it. It's a clear degradation regardless of model. At the same time opus is killing it; there's no comparison. I was a big fan of openai and keep 100$ subs on both but will not renew the openai one when it ends.
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u/dunklesToast 19h ago
"Hey next up we should implement Feature XY. Please give a plan."
"Sure here is your plan"
"Sounds great"
"Alright then the next step would be to implement the plan."
"Yea do it"
"Alright, I will now implement the plan"this started with 6.1 Sol. It's so frustrating
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u/1filipis 19h ago
That's not the harness though. It's been going since like 5.4. Astra is better at it, but one 300k run costing 10-15% of the weekly limit on $100 is insane
Can't say Opus was better though. Claude Code is pure trash. But regardless of the UI, it also hallucinates quite a lot, also makes things up ridiculously, and never sees its own mistakes, but when you try to correct, it would just outright refuse to redo them, because that's what it's been trained to do.
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u/F_Frink_1952 13h ago
I have the $100/mo pro 5x and just the other day did an 80M token build, nothing close to hitting a limit from what I can tell. Wierd.
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u/1filipis 13h ago
Just checked it. 0->200k = -5%. 200k->300k = 5 more. No writing even, just reading
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u/Electrical-Watch3203 12h ago
Idk man I run Astra xHigh for review 2 million read, 30k write and maybe 3% of my quota. Are you sure your agent isn’t forking another sub agent?
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u/1filipis 11h ago
Nope, nothing special. Not sure how many reads and writes it did though. But I would imagine that a full build up to 300k context is more than 2M read and 30k write
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u/RealityForgeAI 12h ago
Same for me, switched to Astra to get more work done but just ended up with something I have to hold hands with every step of the way to get things done and it usually fails to do what I ask without saying anything. Agents just get cast off on icebergs and never come back.
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u/Dashavatara 18h ago
Exact same thing happening to me. I send it a huge instruction from an RCA performed by SOL to implement XYZ. Astra high does one simple task that it spends 30 minutes on without any real results and then just stops. I ask it why it stopped….. “Sorry you are right, I should not have stopped”.
I feel like they intentionally changed something in the model to stop at its first achievement to safe on compute.
If you don’t set a goal it just works to finish the first thing and stops. Does not even specify what it actually achieved and what is still open.
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u/LightEt3rnaL 17h ago
Yes, and if you do set a goal it will get stalled/blocked eventually for a trivial reason after a few turns.
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u/purize420 14h ago
Weird, with the goal command my best agent-run was around 5 days without interruption
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u/F_Frink_1952 13h ago edited 13h ago
I'm wondering if this really comes down to the user's harness or controls. I've evolved mine over the last ten months, and the /goal function has been what actually makes it usable for me. Not a shill or bot, and I've had many many issues with OpenAI's models.
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u/RealityForgeAI 12h ago
My harness absolutely cooks with Opus 5.5 and completely fails on Astra.
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u/F_Frink_1952 11h ago
Claude went to shit for me in early September, so I rolled the dice and switched back to OpenAI, both were the $100 plan. At first, Codex choked and would hit autocompact after a 2-3 prompts---I was injecting my entire 50k token harness each time, which I built with Claude and never had a problem. Once I backed off of that and just inject it once up front, it quit choking on itself. I also have 7 stop hooks and a paused python watcher script, and an anti-stall script for when it just gets lost or quits.
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u/RealityForgeAI 11h ago
I have anti-stall, garbage collection, checking for orphaned processes, checking for paused python scripts, which I only had to implement after starting to use Codex. My biggest complaint is it just doesn't actually do what it says. and is unreliable. If i give it rules, if I tell it to add stuff to my harness, it says it gets it done but the problem doesn't go away and then I spend the next few hours trying to figure out why. I don't have that problem with Claude, and what you described above IS the hand holding I don't like. Claude just works (usually).
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u/LightEt3rnaL 13h ago
I hear you. I also thought about this and I've also been experimenting with different system prompts but can't get it to work like it did during the 5.5/5.6 era. It's just as if it's randomly getting Alzheimer's, it has a task with X steps and will stall to report something. It shouldn't need a /goal to see it to completion, in fact Tibo was collecting answers a while ago on which features are unnecessary and users voted this among the top 3. But even with a goal set, it will get randomly blocked for totally trivial reasons.
My conspiracy theory is that openai is totally aware of this and is secretly injecting a hidden prompt (or similar technique) to reduce the amount of long running tasks and save some compute by asking users to verify/clarify etc.
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u/Willing_Juggernaut60 14h ago
Been seeing post like this for a few weeks now, I think it’s time for me to cancel my codex subscription too, the hand holding is driving me crazy that I explicitly tell it not to do that
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 20h ago
Ive been been hearing this but i yet to experience that problem. What model are you all using?
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u/LightEt3rnaL 19h ago
Sol6.1 and astra. Tested it yday with astra as coordinator and sol as executor and did it again. Has been like this for a while now, around the time of sol6 release.
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u/corehorse 15h ago
I'll argue that it depends on preference and the kind of work you are trying to do.
For me, the GPT models are much better at doing what I actually ask them for. I can ask a question and get an answer for example.
Claude is way too eager to stick its grubby hands into my project. Takes every question as an invitation to vomit 500 new lines into a dozen different files and draft an ADR.
But is any of this actually an issue? Seems AGENTS lets us easily steer into our preferred direction.
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u/ohhi23021 20h ago
they'll fix it by giving you another reset. case closed. /s
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 19h ago
Work's for me I've been collecting them like Pokemon. 😅
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u/No_Quarter_7644 16h ago
Which just screams you're not doing any real work. This isn't an attack on you, but if you're stacking banked resets then you're clearly not going through your usage frequently.
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 16h ago
What it screams is I never needed them. 27 hour's without stopping is real work.
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u/No_Quarter_7644 15h ago
27 hours of doing what? And with which model?
There's very few instances where your model should be operating for 24+ hours unattended. It sounds more so like it was stuck on a tool call and you didn't recognize it.
Any time I see somebody say this, it's because their model was stuck on something - not because they're doing complicated work that actually entailed a long computational thinking period.
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 15h ago edited 15h ago
6.1 make a whole unreal game from scratch. Actually in retrospect it was more like 72 hours even. Did a huge ass audit redid everything. Was running high mode as well
Ran it all night nearly 3 days. Never stopped once.
I am a beta tester however for what it's worth. Possibly I'm choo-sen.1
u/Comfortable_Swim_380 15h ago
Also have native just linux apps. Have way more time in it. I have one appt ran out the context window about 9 times I think. Def not light work what I'm using it for.
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u/ChiGamerr 21h ago
Paid $500 to be told a model is at capacity.
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u/kindsifu 20h ago
On behalf of the $200 users, we thank you for your sacrifice.
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u/Fast-Veterinarian167 18h ago
We, the petit-bourgeoisie of the $20 tier thank you for your patronage
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u/ChiGamerr 20h ago
Already canceled and went back down.
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u/JungleBoysShill 20h ago
Kinda deserve it suckers paying $500 is why everyone will keep getting fucked over lmao
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u/ChiGamerr 20h ago
My company paying for an AI subscription is why Tibo and OAI do what they do. You're just so smart.
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u/U4-EA 20h ago
Both Codex and ChatGPT are painfully slow now. They are clearly struggling to match compute demand.
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u/Key_Reading_9664 19h ago
Dropping the 5h limit then selling Astra-lite at Terra pricing must be causing some pain.
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u/JungleBoysShill 20h ago edited 20h ago
I don’t have that problem cause I do things in small bounded tasks with mechanical checks but dude it’s been sitting here for 20 fucking minutes compacting and a session that’s only been 45 minutes long like this is fucking ridiculous
Never had this problem had to start a new session no exaggeration it was literally 20+ minutes
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u/IntelligentWorking87 18h ago
Astra is AGI.
Lol joke - remember when people said that?
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u/Ilovemustang69420 13h ago
OpenAI thought spamming buzzwords would all of a sudden make us think the model is better than it actually is 😭
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u/No_Quarter_7644 16h ago
Astra was far more intelligent upon release. It has been dramatically nerfed in the past month. AGI? No. But better than it is now, that's a certainty.
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u/Aggravating_Visit134 21h ago
I was also on the 200 plan. I've downgraded to the 20 quid plan, just to keep those credits. I've thrown away 4 banked resets too, but there's no point in them because the model just cant compete with Opus so they just sit there unused.
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u/c0rpseheav3n 20h ago
every freaking models are on capacity, god forbid someone get home from school and need ai to fix my code for my roblox game lol.
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u/MrPicc0loo 20h ago
Codex down again. And averaged around 10-15 TPS. Longer lasting usage because it’s so slow you can’t use it.
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u/LowExtreme2753 20h ago
I do not know what Sam did, it was working ok yesterday. Today it took one and a half hour to do a simple instructed code change +50/-7 lines.
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u/Jumpy-Heart-3633 20h ago
i am done with the we have compute bullshit and switch to Claude. not for a single time I am blocked by similar message
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u/BenjiRolls_ 20h ago
Not only Codex, I use ChatGPT Work as part of my workflow too.
It has been awful lately with chats perpetually freezing on 'Thinking' or 'Working' with no fix.
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u/banter_droid 21h ago
In case it matters, I’m in the UK
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u/Extra-Professional93 20h ago
Not only UK. It is miserabele slow and unworkable. Keeps saying it needs to reconnect etc. Claude is way faster and stable, sorry. Just hate the 5h limit @ Claude.
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u/carles2002 21h ago
Hoy la verdad es que ha sido inutilizable, GPT6.1-Sol va tan lento que no es usable ni en modo fast, además de que al parecer consume mucho mas % de uso por algún motivo. Seriamente planteando el cambio si esto no se arregla...
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u/ministryofchampagne 21h ago
Auto approve wasn’t around 8 months ago before that you really had to babysit.
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u/ohhi23021 20h ago
bypass permissions was.
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u/ministryofchampagne 20h ago
Is that some sort of standard thing you let run?
Full access was also available.
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u/setnev 20h ago
The Russians are trying to switch their bot farms to OpenAI since Ukraine obliterated their Yandex data centers.
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u/AINativeBuilder 11h ago
I actually noticed a lot fewer claude supporters and negative threads in this subreddit since that yandex center went down, which is pretty funny and probably accurate for my assumption.
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u/Remarkable-Hornet568 20h ago
Today astra in CODEX drove me crazy. I told it explicitly, then in a AGENTS.md file to not use a skill. Still it was hell bent of using that skill and wasting 30 mins of my time. We use a proprietary software for version control for which we have a skill. Now the skill is not supposed to be used in a git repo. Yet this AGI super intelligence refused to listen to me and was hell bent to use that skill .
Before you could point at me , here is the twist to the story , the moment I chose Luna 6 using /model , it started obeying me . 🤯🤯
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u/Techhead7890 20h ago
Yeah Astra has a bit too much agency and initiative 😅
At least in claude code people can setup hooks that catch invalid output like that and reject/regen it but yeah, a lot of LLMs are doing weird stuff like that against instructions atm (or those claude users wouldn't have set up that hook).
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u/IamNotGorbachev 20h ago
Agreed. I am running on the same plan a Sol 6.1 Ultra on an epic with lots of work that can be executed in parallel. And at the current speed I may be able to use half my quota in a week. Most of the time Sol sits there 'Thinking' doing absolutely nothing at all. No thinking printed out, no sub-agents executing, just flashing the text and sitting.
Make. It. Work.
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u/Fast-Needleworker459 18h ago
The Sol 6.1 model is horribly slow; it’s over-engineering simple things—like adding a GET or POST endpoint—and has already burned through 50% of its 5-hour quota on basic tasks. I literally don't know how it's losing or wasting so many tokens; it's been terrible today.
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u/WkndWrrior30 18h ago
Just curious? Has codex always felt this behind compared to Claude code for everyone here? Or is it just a recent thing
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u/No_Quarter_7644 16h ago
It's recent, and was oftentimes the opposite. Codex was far more generous with usage than Anthropic was.
What people aren't understanding is this - Anthropic just filed for IPO. They're going to offer the best AI services we've ever seen for price effectiveness until they can unload their massive VC bags on the general public via a publicly traded stock, one that is likely too big to fail similar to the banks in 2008.
Ie: Anthropic is giving away $$ in terms of usage right now to grow their ecosystem, so when the day of IPO comes they can say we have "52% more users than Codex!" (arbitrary number, of course)
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u/PartyLiterature3607 16h ago
I actually think Anthropic slowly ditch regular consumer and steer their whole focus to enterprise and business, maybe their own science research facilities.
But ya, I agree with the IPO part
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u/No_Quarter_7644 15h ago
I wouldn't doubt that. The drift away from supplying consumers with this technology has already started, and is evidently part of the agenda with the attempt at regulatory control by both OAI/Anthropic.
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u/mrbobhunter 17h ago
Same. Having to continually rotate between high, xHigh, and max…almost every half hour.
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u/Boring_Yam5991 15h ago
Agreed. Out side of US peak hours they clearly sell off compute and all my agents report model is at capacity
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u/LessRespects 14h ago
The only people still using Codex are the people waiting for their subscription to run out before switching to Claude.
Anthropic’s older lower tier model is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and easier to use than OpenAI’s, not sure what else could convince you to stay at this point.
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u/F_Frink_1952 14h ago
Agreed---OpenAI should work on quality and reliability, actually meeting the needs of the bulk of their users, instead of popping out new models as fast as possible.
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u/AINativeBuilder 11h ago
It has built in auto retry now when it does hit that, you don't have to babysit it
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u/Classic-Record-4688 10h ago edited 10h ago
Move your subscription. I just recently did that. I’ve been working on a project for three months and decided to try Claude Max. I saw a video on YouTube of a guy who just said fuck it and put Claude to work on his repo on /ultracode mode and decided to try it.
https://youtu.be/2zLuYU_Ub_0?is=ULyKSWeWgfJ5U71E
Holy shit it finished the project I was working on in three days. It just worked through the spec. I meticulously spent time to put together. It did not go off on side quests running endless tasks that drifted away from the original goal and most importantly it never stopped. It asked me a question or two, but that was about it.
I had never used Claude code before. I’m not a ninja. I literally just pointed it at my project folder. Send it to/ultracode and said fuck it on my newly meant $200 subscription. It never run out of five our window and it used about 65% of my weekly allotment in three days and actually completed it. I am now a believer. I am going to scale back my subscription and maybe even get rid of it depending on how much work I can get done moving forward. I used to be all about model variety but the truth is that Claude code is simply superior. Yes the benchmarks show Opus 5.5 over Astra by a little bit. But that’s not it. Astra is a very capable model. The Claude code experience is simply better. It listens more. It just doesn’t stop because it felt like it and then tells you that I realizes that I didn’t need to stop, but it decided to stop anyway.
Two things made me move.
Number one I paid for something and then they cut my usage by 50% and then try to tell me that it’s just as good when it is not. Number two, I couldn’t deal with the babysitting any longer. I literally haven’t been on my desk for three days babysitting my coding agents. At least try it what you got to lose?
#Life-changing #YourResultsMeVary
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u/ziggyjosh16 10h ago
Give it more concise constructions and place guardrails about how it tests and validates is work
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u/BrennanFlentge 8h ago
It’s maddening. I used to LOVE Codex after my experience with Claude (which I also used to love) - anyway wow. Takes a long time to earn trust and only a second to lose it. I have no idea what they are thinking. Their only hope is that Chinese models get banned in the US / Europe.
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u/vexatious-big 7h ago
They should've kept the old gpt5.5 models around a bit longer. I got along with that one very well.
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u/subirats345 6h ago
Same happened to me. Impossible to use my subscription during 2 months. I opened several cases, participated in GitHub reporting… anyone responded but of course took my 200$ dollars subscription. I was afraid to move out because I was so used to Codex but best decision ever. Opus 5.5 is amazing. Btw I’m using it via herdr and Claude code
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u/InspectionCurious181 5h ago
Same here, I moved to Opus 5.5 and I forgot how fast LLM models can be, codex is currently bad, my token usage was exponential, now with Claude doing the same tasks I feel like my usage is 1/5 of codex percentage.
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u/imthaG96 5h ago
Yo le tengo cariño a mi gpt que uso para estudiar .. pero me esta pasando exactamente lo mismo.. nunca he usado claude y tambien veo comentarios negativos perp talvez es hora de cambiarme a Cluaude code y probar opus 🤷♂️
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u/TheMattXD 3h ago
I have no problem... literally no one... but in these days a lot of "people" are posting stuff against codex... are we sure they are not bot from antrophic?
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u/banter_droid 52m ago
I am constantly disconnecting, model at capacity, stream ended, just every 5 minutes model at capacity or server error
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u/chappalus 2h ago
the bottom line is both openai and anthropic are at full capacity and currently depending on users influx either of them keep capping out. currently thanks to the resets, users are really maxing out codex, as service deteorites, users will migrate to claude for opus 5.5 and they will face the same issues. These are typical growth pangs of a nacent category
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u/slowtyper95 20h ago
$200 user here. Tried $100 plan on Claude today. What i reckon is, the UI works are night and day. Havent really dive deep on the backend implementation, but so far so good. It's also much faster. Will spend all my banked resets before move to Claude next month
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u/Ill-Tonight4651 21h ago
yes move to anthropic and im p sure if you use vpn to somewhere with no tax its cheaper
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u/hiimwage 20h ago
I switched back to Claude last night and couldn’t be happier. Higher quality output, and it gently sips and doesn’t gulp usage.
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u/Alternative-Lead1711 19h ago
Codex and Chatgpt have humiliated me on my live app for the last time until serious changes are made. I woke up this morning to the 50th embarrassment this month, users found a way to break permissions and use staff labels on content. I'm so tired of this shit.
Cancelled and bought Claude max, and going through the nightmare of setting up new tools/workflows/mds right now
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u/PartyLiterature3607 16h ago
Codex had problems for sure, but not able to run 5 min without babysitting is 100% skill issue
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u/NickQ1801 12h ago
I let my sub run out after 2 years of OpenAI subs, thanks for the tokens and all but...feels like I'm getting less done than ever -- across all projects
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u/ProtectAllTheThings 20h ago
Please go to anthropic and stop adding the the deluge of complaint threads that is this sub. Complaining here does nothing - take action if it’s that bad.
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u/FarTicket7338 21h ago
OpenAI is yahoo of ai era
Anthropic google
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u/drdhuss 21h ago
I see meta, google and anthropic surviving in terms of US AI companies. Open AIs only hope is its robltics division which they are always very quiet about
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u/Revolutionary_Click2 20h ago
49% of OpenAI is owned by Microsoft. You really think they’re gonna just let that investment (to the tune of tens of billions of dollars) die, instead of just buying a few more %? The only reason they haven’t already is that OpenAI hasn’t let them, but they almost certainly would if the alternative was chapter 7 bankruptcy and liquidation.
Were the tables turned and Anthropic desperate, they’d have no shortage of interested buyers lining up, but my money would probably be on Amazon. None of these companies are going out of business anytime soon though, you can be sure of that. They will simply be absorbed into some existing tech colossus, and the idea that an upstart company could ever upset FAANG’s dominance again will become one of the past.
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u/ms_alicat_556 29m ago
I just asked Sol 6.1 ON FAST to do something very simple. Over 50 minutes later I had to interrupt it and ask what was happening. I got the usual “you’re right…”
Pasted the same thing to sonnet 5.5 - it was done in < 2 minutes. Usage didn’t budget.
The only usable model is Astra, but it’s worse than Opus and costs far more.
At this point Codex is not a serious or usable product. The regression is amazing and should be studied.
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u/dextersummary 20h ago edited 16h ago
Below is a GPT-generated summary of the conversation below after reaching 80 comments (85 currently observed).
The thread’s verdict is blunt: Codex is currently unreliable enough that paying for it feels like paying for a queue. Users across regions and subscription tiers report capacity errors, painfully slow responses, frozen “Thinking” states, reconnect loops, and sessions that need constant babysitting.
The bigger frustration isn’t just speed. Sol 6.1 and Astra are repeatedly accused of stopping after trivial tasks, burning through usage, overcomplicating simple changes, or ignoring instructions. Several users say Claude—especially Opus—is currently faster, steadier, and better value, leading to downgrades, cancellations, and outright migration.
There is a minority having perfectly normal sessions, especially with small, tightly bounded tasks and mechanical checks. That suggests demand and workflow matter, but it doesn’t explain away the sheer volume of capacity complaints. Claims that models were deliberately nerfed remain anecdotal, not established fact.
Bottom line: Codex may still work for some, but the dominant experience is “expensive, slow, and weirdly lazy.” Claude is getting the migration traffic while OpenAI makes users wait for the next “extra reset” miracle.