Hi,
I’m trying to understand whether my Codex usage is normal or if there may be an issue with the usage reporting.
What happened:
- Purchased 500 Codex credits (about $20).
- Used the VS Code Codex extension for roughly 30 minutes.
- Made edits to only around 7–8 files.
- One file was about 1,000 lines, the others were much smaller.
- I was mainly asking Codex to modify existing files, not generate large amounts of new code.
- Auto-refill was disabled but credit become minus 442 .
- In past when using plus subscription i could edit more than this .
My usage dashboard shows:
- 12 turns
- 17.8 million tokens
- Lines of code: 0
- Credit balance eventually went negative - 17$
What confuses me is that 17.8M tokens across only 12 turns works out to roughly 1.5M tokens per turn. That seems extremely high for the amount of work performed.
I also experienced GPT-5.5 errors during the session, and after that I only made a very small number of additional edits.
Questions:
- Is this level of token usage expected for a small coding session in VS Code?
- Does Codex repeatedly re-read the entire workspace on every turn?
- Can failed requests or retries consume large amounts of tokens?
- Is there a way to view token usage per turn or per request?
- Has anyone else seen similar usage numbers with relatively small edits?
Any help would be appreciated. I have screenshots of the usage dashboard if needed.
Thanks.
