Codex run consumed 80% pro-plan + $700 through recursive scope churn

[EricGT]

Welcome to the forum!

@DigitalNick

thoughts on additional controls you put in place to mitigate this risk?

I can not say this will help with your specific problem but it has worked for me and the other user who also learned from it.

How many Codex tokens have we burned because the task was too broad, the context too large, and the workflow designed for an older model?

I think many people in this community will recognize this scenario. A large AGENTS.md. Maximum context. A detailed prompt. One big /goal. Codex starts working confidently: it explores the repository, builds a plan, and changes the code. Then the scope expands, unnecessary files are read, one fix creates another problem, and in the end we get an expensive result that still needs to be partially rewritten. For a long time, I thought the solution was to give the model even more information an…

LLM for Development, Scripts for Production: A Lesson from a Failed AI Workflow

A useful lesson from today. I had a business idea that required collecting, filtering, enriching, and analyzing a large number of small-business records. I initially prepared a very detailed prompt and ran the entire task through an OpenAI reasoning model at maximum settings. The result: all available tokens were consumed in about 14 minutes, while the task itself was still far from complete. Then I followed advice that another developer from this community had given me earlier: repetitive an…