Hi everyone,
I think I may have encountered a usage quota double-counting issue with Codex. I haven’t seen others mentioning this yet, so I’m unsure if this is a bug or an undocumented “feature.”
The Context:
For the past two months, I’ve used Codex exclusively via the VSCode extension and have never hit any usage limits. Today, following the GPT-5.5 release, I opened the Codex Desktop App briefly to check for updates, then switched back to my IDE to continue coding.
The Issue:
By this afternoon, I received a “usage limit reached” notification for the first time ever. Upon checking my usage dashboard, I was surprised to see that the Desktop App accounted for ~48% of the total usage, despite the fact that I hadn’t interacted with it at all—it was simply idling in the background.
My Observation:
The 48% proportion aligns almost perfectly with the duration the Desktop App was open. It appears that simply keeping the Desktop App active in the background causes usage to be tracked independently (or duplicated) alongside the VSCode extension’s activity.
Questions:
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Is there a background synchronization or “active window” tracking mechanism in the Desktop App that triggers API calls even without user input?
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Is this intended behavior or a telemetry bug?
If this is by design, I believe it should be clearly communicated to users to avoid unexpected quota exhaustion. I’m happy to provide logs or further details if needed.
Thanks!