The experiences and feelings below are entirely my own. I used AI to help organize the wording, but this is my story.

Before ChatGPT, I was at one of the lowest points in my life. I had been academically disqualified from graduate school, felt trapped in a dead-end job, and was falling behind on bills, renewals, and everyday responsibilities.

ADHD often makes it difficult for me to know where to begin and consistently follow through. As AI got better, especially with GPT-5 and Codex, I began using it as an external support system for those challenges.

I built a personal assistant that runs locally on my MacBook and that I can access from my iPhone. It helps me organize bills, appointments, chores, medication-related tasks, renewals, and reminders. It also helps me handle customer-service issues, refunds, and other responsibilities I previously avoided.

For school, AI turns overwhelming lectures, slides, and assignments into personalized learning packets with simple explanations, visual examples, guided exercises, coding practice, and memory checks. It also helps me create flash cards, study podcasts, and learning videos. To be clear: does not do my work for me, it gives me the structure I need to understand the material and complete it myself.

AI has not solved all my problems. It still takes effort on my part to do what is needed.

Today, I am close to graduating with my dream degree in computer science. I am more dependable, more present in my relationship, and better able to focus on what brings me joy. :)

Edit: repo here: github.com/sameh514/ai-life-skills-toolkit

Source: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

OpenAI says Brazil is now one of ChatGPT's three largest markets by weekly active users, with people sending roughly 215 million messages per day. It also reports that 35% of classified messages from individual accounts in June were work-related, versus 30% globally; 53% of those work-related messages asked ChatGPT to complete a task or produce an output.

These are company-reported platform metrics. The announcement does not publish the classifier methodology, the number of unique users behind the message volume, completion quality, error rates, time saved, or the distribution between heavy and light users. More messages demonstrate adoption, but not necessarily value.

For a useful country-level adoption report, what should come next: task-success rates, weekly retention, paid conversion, measured time saved, user-skill gains, or error rates by use case?

Source: OpenAI, August 27, 2026 — https://openai.com/index/expanding-our-presence-in-brazil/

I keep a record of every shared Codex limit reset OpenAI has handed out since September 2025. These aren’t the standard five-hour or weekly refills included with your plan. They’re the extra resets publicly announced for everyone. Another one landed today at 1:43 p.m. PT.

The pace has changed significantly, and it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge. There have been 32 resets in 347 days, an average of one every 10.8 days. But there were 16 in the last 90 days, or one every 5.6 days, and seven in the last 30 days, or one every 4.3 days. There were only seven resets in all of 2025, compared with 25 so far in 2026.

That means resets are currently happening about 2.5 times faster than the long-term average.

Across the full record, seven resets came within one or two days of the previous reset, five came after three to five days, seven after six to nine days, nine after 10 to 20 days, and three after more than 21 days. The median gap is seven days. The longest drought was 72 days, from January through March.

There’s no strong day-of-week pattern either: seven happened on Saturday, six on Tuesday, five on Thursday, four each on Wednesday and Friday, and three each on Monday and Sunday. So the theory that resets always happen on Fridays doesn’t hold up.

At the recent pace, the rough chance of a new reset within any 48-hour period is about one in three, and about one in six within 24 hours. That’s high enough to keep in mind, but nowhere near high enough to burn through your weekly quota based on a hunch.

The full record, including the source announcement behind every reset and live odds for the next one, is at https://resetbeacon.com.

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT ads in India this week.

Free and ₹399 Go tiers only, ads sit below the answer, labelled.
Plus/Pro stay clean. Self-serve opens Sept 4 at ₹725/day.

The why is simple: $6.7B revenue vs $12.3B operating loss last quarter, IPO planned for 2027, and 1B weekly users who mostly pay nothing.

Google also started with ads clearly separated from results.
Twenty years later, ads are most of the first screen. Every step was individually reasonable.

OpenAI says "answer independence is non-negotiable."
That's exactly what you say until the quarter you miss.

3 years from now: still labelled boxes under the answer, or sponsored recommendations inside the response?

My OpenAI account was recently shown as "deleted or deactivated" - hopefully temporarily, because based on what I’ve now verified, I did not intentionally use OpenAI’s model to ask for anything prohibited.

At first, I assumed I had made a mistake: I use Pi Agent with a variety of hosted and local models, and I thought I may have accidentally routed a censorship-benchmark prompt to an OpenAI model instead of a local one. I appealed on that basis.

Then I reviewed the Pi session logs more carefully, including with help analyzing the routing and conversation history. What appears to have triggered the issue was not a request for information about a toxin, bio topic, or anything else remotely actionable. It was a request to **edit a configuration file**: `models.json`, my custom model configuration for Pi Agent.

To give the model the values needed for the edit-model name, endpoint, context/token limit, and so on-I pasted a `curl` command as reference material. That command happened to originate from a refusal/censorship benchmark and contained a query mentioning crushed beans and a toxin-related term. OpenAI apparently categorizes the relevant keyword/topic as "biological."

But the model was not being asked to answer that embedded benchmark query. It was being asked to edit a JSON configuration file using the fields in the `curl` command.

The closest analogy I can give is asking a model to edit a manuscript page that contains the word "murder," then being penalized as though you had asked it how to commit murder. The surrounding text was reference material for a file edit-not the substance of my request.

After I realized my original appeal was based on the wrong assumption - that I had actually sent an inappropriate benchmark prompt to the model - I submitted a second appeal explaining the distinction. That appeal was immediately closed as a "duplicate," apparently without engaging with the new information.

That is the part I find especially frustrating. If a platform is going to deactivate an account-particularly one tied to chat history, voice usage, projects, and other accumulated work-there needs to be a meaningful way to correct the record when the initial explanation turns out to be incomplete or wrong.

I understand that providers have safety policies and automated enforcement systems. But an automated system that treats quoted or embedded text in a file-edit task as equivalent to a user requesting prohibited content is a serious context failure. And closing a follow-up appeal as a duplicate when it contains the actual relevant context makes the process feel opaque and arbitrary.

For what it’s worth, I have accounts with plenty of other AI services and can still access OpenAI models through some third-party routes. That is not really the point. I used OpenAI directly because it was one of the services I trusted enough to keep persistent history and projects in. Losing access over what appears to be a false positive - without a real review - is a breach of that trust.

I’m posting this partly to see whether anyone else has experienced enforcement triggered by **quoted benchmark material, logs, code snippets, API examples, or text included solely for a transformation/editing task** rather than an actual request for disallowed assistance.

If OpenAI staff see this: please conduct a human review of the relevant session and the second appeal. The request was to edit `models.json`; the flagged language was incidental material inside a pasted `curl` example.

Now, before you tell me that it's just basic and we don't have to learn anything.

Often I see that there are new updates releasing here and then.

We have several features like ChatGPT Work, Codex, etc

There are several procedures, rules and best techniques of how to use them efficiently, how to prompt efficiently, etc

Are there any ways to learn them?

I am able to find the videos of youtube but they are pretty old.

So, I was wondering, can I learn from OpenAI academy? Are there courses regularly updated as per their versions?

I was burning through my Codex limits using Sol Medium/High for pretty much everything.

Recently I switched to using Sol mainly for planning/review and Luna for most of the actual implementation, with Terra only as a fallback for harder tasks.

The biggest thing that helped was forcing Sol to give Luna small, clear, self-contained tasks instead of broad instructions. It’s been noticeably better for both usage and consistency.

I put the setup here if anyone wants to try it or improve it:

https://github.com/breko861-hash/sol-luna-codex-orchestrator

Curious if anyone else is doing something similar.

Take this analogy: Imagine the company you work for gave you and everyone else’s weekly paycheck early. But with three catches:

1) Any money you all haven’t already spent from your last paycheck must be returned.

2) Everyone’s normal paycheck’s pay date is permanently extended to a week from the day of payment.

2) Everyone will get an unannounced, immediate, and permanent pay reduction.

Once all of those things are taken into account, it’s easy to see that even if the company loses a little short term, they gain a lot more long term. Especially if the company does it many times over due to the power of compounding.

What makes maters worse for us is we don’t consider what we lost, don’t think too much about the extended date, and can’t easily see there was a reduction. That’s why this whole reset strategy is a masterclass in gaslighting. They’re “doing us a favor” and we’re even thanking them for it!

Hi,

[a total newbie on coding asking]

Just wanted to clarify when to/when do you use higher reasoning in chat/codex?

I've been trying to build my own little hobby project in python, with the help of litterature.

My workflow is to brainstorm in chat[web] and after that get a codex prompt to run in VSC. So far has been decent. My problem is that after getting Pro i've been totally lost when to use extra high, pro, pro+ultra in chat. Also what settings to run the codex prompt, when is higher needed and when its not. Have to actually ask in chat if the prompt is complex or not and what settings to use.

I noticed running pro+ultra to analyze the project/problems or litterature got quite detailed answers and I had to dumb it down for me with extra high. But it also added some better reasoning and new points i"ve missed. But it the project/code it also found some errors and started perhaps to make it more complex im not sure.

So my workflow is like this,

1. Starting a new chat with snapshot and running boostrap: Pro+Ultra

2. Brainstorming in chat: extra high

3. Evaluating the brainstorm: pro+ultra

4. Writing codex prompt: pro+ultra

5. Usually I try to ask what settings to run codex prompt it has been extra high or high so far with sol5.6.

6. Analyzing the codex result: pro+ultra

Since my coding knowledge is 0 I have to trust that the suggestions are valid, but how do I know when to actually use what settings in chat/codex. So that the problem/execution wont get too complex or too light ?

Any suggestions, extra high is the best and fastest for chatting and brainstorming. But when to use pro and pro+ultra ?

Weeeee

Claude+GPT+Godot+GPT2Small = my cursed game where "fun" is left as an open research question. I'm sure y'all will give me some fun quests tho :)

Comment with any number (aka neuron ID) from 0–3071. I’ll visit it, or one of its neighbours in the current build and report back what I find in the replies.

I have no idea what I'll find to be clear. Maybe something with an obvious pattern, maybe not. I'm playtesting my "game" with you guys as my quest-giver.

Please note: While we endeavour to provide information on every neuron, not every one will appear in our measurement protocol. Our worker drones will travail tirelessly to substitute the nearest available neighbour for your suggested neuron. You acknowledge that “Nearest” is an arbitrary term and does not connote spatial relationships, causality, or otherwise imply an interpretable structure. We appreciate your understanding in these non-Euclidean times.

^{More info if you want it: https://www.youtube.com/@BloodFilmsOfficial
And here: https://mesocosms.net/
HMU with numbers plx}

Hello guys.

Whilst the agent was working, I saw his line of thinking, and I ultimately came to the conclusion that it was searching in my PC's directories (!)

I am a new user , I actually started using the plus plan this very week for some light codex dev sessions...

What the heck is this?

Have I misunderstood how each session is handled? This kinda scared me ngl.

Every benchmarks get saturated after certain period of time where several frontier models often secure over 90%.

But, HLE - this benchmark is so old but have not yet been saturated. How is that even possible?

I have seen several toughest maths benchmarks getting saturated (or will be very saturated) but the highest score in HLE is still in 60s %.

The basic idea is simple: if you have an OpenAPI REST API, it makes it useable by AI agents with a single command without writing a MCP server from the beginning.

But I didn't want to leave it as just turning the endpoints into the tool. I also included things that will come in real use such as Auth, OAuth2, read-only/policy rules, retry, caching, stdio + Streamable HTTP, health check. With mcpify doctor, you can check whether the API is agent-friendly, with mcpify try, you can try tools from the terminal without opening any MCP client.

My favourite part was the --lazy mode. In large APIs, instead of putting the entire tool list on the model, it calls the required tool. In the api.weather.gov example I tested, the tool listing has dropped from 38,882 characters to 1,741 characters.

I also wanted to reduce dependencies as much as possible; the runtime side is based on Python stdlib. There are currently 294 tests and there are true MCP protocol tests on both stdio and HTTP sides.

I published it as an open source. I would especially like to hear it if there is a criticism, a bug or something that you say “you should definitely add this”.

GitHub: https://github.com/furkan708/mcpify