I’ve been using Codex since the day it became available to me, and it’s quickly become indispensable in my workflow. It’s not just a tool, it’s now woven into my daily engineering process for code generation, repo refactors, QA passes and structured system design.
However, since the introduction of the credit system, usage visibility has become unpredictable. Even with a disciplined workflow, I can burn through my weekly limit after only a few structured runs where as before I had no issues and I could proceed effectively.
Over the past few days, many of the public-facing posts about Codex have focused on new capabilities and internal success stories. That’s great to see, but it’s also created the impression that user concerns around usage limits are being framed as simple change resistance.
For many of us, that’s not the issue. The challenge isn’t adapting to a new model, it’s the lack of clarity around how to plan for it. Predictability, not entitlement, is what professional users are asking for.
What’s unclear
-
The relationship between messages, cloud tasks and actual credit drawdown
-
Whether the published ranges (e.g. 300–1500 local messages or 50–400 cloud tasks / 5 hours) are hard limits or dynamic quotas
-
How to financially plan for compute-intensive but legitimate use cases (multi-step reasoning and tracing or refactoring loops).
-
Whether there’s an engineering roadmap for transparent usage metering (something akin to Anthropic’s explicit credit tables).
Why this matters
For builders relying on Codex as a core part of their development stack, predictability is essential. The current model makes it hard to plan workloads or budget realistically, we’re not sure if heavy use is being discouraged or just under-documented.
Codex has the potential to be transformative for autonomous engineering, but if usage becomes unpredictable, it limits how confidently we can rely on it for mission-critical work.
What would help
Could OpenAI provide:
-
A clear example of what constitutes one cloud task and its approximate credit cost
-
A public usage calculator or cost estimator
-
Clarification of whether Codex CLI and Codex Cloud are metered differently
-
Any insight into upcoming quota adjustments for Pro/Plus tiers
If any staff can clarify or point to documentation, that would be appreciated, the community would benefit from clear, predictable guidance.
