I’m seeing a severe regression in Codex 5-hour usage efficiency, with some tightly defined examples.
Historically, across ~100 five-hour sessions doing similar repo work, I only exhausted the allowance once or twice. I used GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra Medium for many of those sessions and typical tasks were often ~5–13 minutes.
The first abnormal run I noticed yesterday was on Astra and exhausted the 5-hour allowance. I then deliberately reverted to GPT-5.6 Sol Medium as a temporary workaround/test, because that was the configuration I had previously used without issue.
That did not solve it:
- one local WSL GPT-5.6 Sol Medium run took ~55 minutes and used ~74–76% of a fresh 5-hour window;
- a later very small compatibility fix used another ~12% of the full window, taking me from 18% remaining to 6%.
I’ve ruled out the obvious local changes: local WSL not cloud, no relevant AGENTS.md, no external MCP servers, no explicit Fast service-tier config.
The large recovery run was itself only necessary because an earlier task had already hit the limit mid-run, so it was a consequence of the problem, not the cause.
Practical impact: Codex has gone from excellent for continuous development to effectively unusable for the same kind of work, because even ordinary tasks now consume such a large fraction of the 5-hour allowance that I repeatedly have to stop and wait for reset.
I’m not claiming something changed exactly on 7 Sept — that is simply when I first observed the abnormal behaviour. The previous time I used Codex it was behaving normally.