Quick everyone to your side projects. We have ~3 days of un-nerfed agentic coding again.
It went through my $20 plan's session limit in 15 minutes, implementing two smallish features in an iOS app.
That was with the effort on auto.
It looks like full time work would require the 20x plan.
At $20/month your daily cost is $0.67 cents a day. Are you really complaining that you were able to get it to implement two small features in your app for 67 cents?
For a first test, it did seem like it burned through the usage even faster than usual.
GitHub Copilot’s 7.5x billing factor over 3x with Opus 4.6 seems to suggest it indeed consumes more tokens.
Now I’m just waiting for OpenAI to show their hand before deciding which of the plans to upgrade from the $20 to the $100 plan.
If you got in a taxi, and they charged you relative to taking a horse carriage, people should be upset.
You got into a taxi and they were charging you horse carriage prices initially. They're still not charging you for a full taxi ride but people are complaining because their (mistaken) assumption was that taxis can be provided as cheaply as horse carriages.
People are angry because their expectations were not managed properly which I understand.
But many of us realized that $20 or even $200 was far too low for such advanced capabilities and are not that surprised that all of the companies are raising prices and decreasing usage limits.
OpenAI is not far behind, they're simply taking their time because they're okay with burning through capital more quickly than Anthropic is, and because OpenAI's clearly stated ambition is to win market share, not to be a responsibly, sustainably run company.
Codex, this afternoon, I was able to use for like two hours on the $20 plan. Maybe limits will be tighter in the future. But with new data centers, new GPU generations, and research advances it might rather get cheaper.
Anyway, as you said, this is all pretty cheap. I'll go with the $100 Codex plan, since I now figured out how to nicely work on multiple changes in parallel via the Codex app with worktrees. I imagine the same is possible in Claude Code.
Full time work where you have the LLM do all the code has always required the larger plans.
The $20/month plans are for occasional use as an assistant. If you want to do all of your work through the LLM you have to pay for the higher tiers.
The Codex $20/month plan has higher limits, but in my experience the lower quality output leaves me rewriting more of it anyway so it's not a net win.
This being said, I know I'm an outlier.