I’ve spent this whole week in a Codex honeymoon.
Start with quota. Whether it was Claude Code or Codex, my weekly limit used to reset constantly, and every reset stung. Last week I finally had an AI set up a scheduler for me: every 5 hours it fires a message with the cheapest model just to open a new 5-hour window. After 11pm, if my weekly quota is running more than 10% behind pace, it scans every future to-do that can be finished automatically, knocks them all out, and either tags them “pending decision” or opens a PR for me to review when I wake up. That way the weekly quota gets used to the last drop without ever blocking what I need during the day.
Then I switched to Codex, and that whole scheduler barely got used. I couldn’t burn through the quota no matter what I did.
The most extreme case was writing an ML paper for a professor friend. He had three complete sets of proposal prompts, writing conventions, and a long list of constraints. I picked up a $20 Codex burner account that had just had its weekly quota reset, and opened GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra on it. The quota ran out after 1.5 hours, but because I had /goal on, Sol clamped down like a rabid dog and refused to let go. It finished 2.5 hours later. Even the figures came straight out of native gpt-image-2. Writing, reformatting to the journal’s spec, coding, running the experiments, it handled all of it. When I sent it to my professor friend, he said the quality was about the same as the paper I’d previously run for him on a $100 Fable plan that burned through the entire quota. Except this time it only cost $20 (really more like $5, since this was just one weekly cycle), and Claude still can’t generate images natively. Even on frontier academic work, Fable is still too expensive.
The next day I opened Sol Ultra again and wrote him four more papers, finally managing to burn through the weekly quota. Then it reset the moment I woke up, with what looked like another reset coming the day after. OpenAI was clearly moving on this too around the same time. Tibo posted on X that they’d temporarily removed the 5-hour usage limit for Plus, Business, and Pro plans, made GPT-5.6 Sol more efficient across the board, and even rolled out banked resets to 500k ChatGPT Work and Codex users.
Switching from Claude Code to Codex feels a lot like the first time I landed in Thailand. Surprises everywhere. Turn on /goal and the quota runs out, but it’s still gnawing away at the problem. What kind of dedication is that? The subscription’s cost-per-value is absurdly high, the weekly quota just won’t run out no matter what. Turn on /fast for 1.5x consumption and it still won’t run out. And the biggest one: mid tool-call, the model finally started talking like a human. Talking to Claude, I could never tell if it was my Chinese or my English that was the problem.
The tool chain shifted too. I used to build teaching-video animations with Claude Code + Remotion, and constantly ran into text overflow, animation that didn’t sync with the narration, all that. Now I do the exact same thing with Codex + Hyperframe and it works on the first try, and somehow costs less quota. This isn’t sponsored. When I go looking for tools I actively avoid the ones that are.
Still in the honeymoon phase. Whether it gets dumber later, I don’t know. But right now, these past few days, it’s genuinely the feeling of quota I can’t spend fast enough.