Four Days of Codex Became Four Hours. One Prompt Took a Whole Limit.
On Sunday, Codex subscribers on the $200 and $20 plans reported allowances draining in hours and a GPT 6.1 Sol model they no longer trust. OpenAI listed no incident.
Code on a laptop screen, shown for illustration. Photo: Marc Mueller via Unsplash, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On Sunday, October 18, three Codex subscribers posted separate complaints to the r/codex community on Reddit within hours of each other. Each one described the same thing from a different angle: a paid allowance that now runs out far faster than it used to, and a model that is harder to rely on while it does.
"Before dot: 4 days of Codex. After dot: 4 hours."
The first post came from a subscriber on the $200 a month plan. Under the title "Before dot: 4 days of Codex. After dot: 4 hours," the user wrote that a weekly allowance "used to last three to four days of normal work," and that after adding dot to coordinate roughly the same workload, they had been "burning through it in three to four hours." The user said the new Codex desktop usage analytics show a dramatic before and after, with large "Agent created chats" bars appearing around October 1, a day after they started using dot on September 30.
A second r/codex post on the same day, titled "I broke dot," said a project that had been building a QuickBooks style program through dot since the start of the month stopped working that day with the message "root executor preparation for your dot failed."
One prompt, nearly a full five hour limit
A third subscriber wrote under the title "Usage after reset become unusable" that they had already downgraded from the $200 plan to the $20 plan. The post says that on Sunday "one prompt of 6.1 xhigh which I always used depleted nearly 100% of my 5hr limit and 15% of my weekly," which the user calculated as fewer than 10 prompts a week. The post ends with a warning that they will cancel the subscription altogether at this rate.
"Confusification"
A fourth post, titled "given up on codex," was about quality rather than limits. The user wrote that they would let their monthly subscription run out and move to Gemini or Claude, because "whatever is going on with sol 6.1, it's not good." The post says the model is "extremely inconsistent at the same thinking level" and "spends hours messing up a project, only to find it doesn't meet the most basic of original criteria." The user called it "not just hallucination," and gave it a name: "confusification."
What OpenAI has said
The OpenAI status page we read Sunday morning listed no open incident. Its recent history shows "Degraded performance in GPT 6.1 Sol Codex and Work mode" on October 13 and "Degraded performance in Codex and ChatGPT Work" on October 14, both marked resolved, and nothing since about usage drain. None of the four posts had a reply from OpenAI staff when we read them. These are individual user reports, and we have not independently measured any account's usage.
We will update this page if OpenAI addresses the usage reports.
Sources
- r/codex: Before dot: 4 days of Codex. After dot: 4 hours. (October 18, 2026)
- r/codex: I broke dot (October 18, 2026)
- r/codex: Usage after reset become unusable (October 18, 2026)
- r/codex: given up on codex (October 18, 2026)
- OpenAI status page, read October 18, 2026