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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

Hijacking popular thread to ask: What are the usage limits now for Codex and Claude?

A while back I gave the same task to both, and Codex used 20x less of my 5-hour limit (both on the $20/month plan).

(This annoyed me since I tend to prefer Claude, but the limits at the time made it unusable for anything serious.)

However, since that time, both providers have massively reduced usage allowances (and at least one of them has gotten sued for it, lol).

I'm not currently subscribed to either but I'm weighing my options. With GPT being slightly better than Opus, and it used to have way higher limits, I'm leaning in the direction of an OpenAI sub. But I'm wondering if the current state matches my memory from 2-3 months ago. (Since both companies appear to be cost-cutting hard!)

Prefer responses from people who use both, but anecdotes welcome :)

Thanks!

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I find the Codex usage super generous (but on the $200 plan, I also have the Claude $200 plan). I can run xhigh with subagents pretty much all my waking hours if I want to. If I turn on speed (1.5x) I will hit the 5 hour limit sometimes.

I prefer Claude's vibe over 5.5 but 5.5 seems much less lazy. I'm sure it depends a lot on tasks and prompt strategy though.

This is the correct answer, but GPT-5.5's personality is totally fine. Steipete said best when GPT-5.5 is just German humorless compsci PhD.

If they deleted my bloodline every time I showed an atom of vigor, I'd convert to German too

I easily burn through 3 $200 plans in less than a week. I am often using 4-6 sessions at once and do run overnight goals though typically 2 at once. Almost never use fast.

Claude plans are more generous now by about 2-3x but Anthropic slowed their tps a month or so ago so you’re not getting the speed. It’s flip flopped, Codex tightened it significantly recently and used to be more generous.

I do split between work, personal and OSS projects, which is why I have the plans.

This has been my experience as well, at least for the last few weeks. Codex 5.5 is the better planner and coder across big projects, but Opus is fine, though my Claude 5 hour window lasts ~2x longer than Codex. So I’ll sometimes use an orchestrator/worker skill to spread the load.

This past month with Claude Max 5x actually felt really generous in terms of usage with a lot of resets because of Fable, bugs.

Honestly pretty similar levels of usage if you are using 5.5 high or Opus 4.8 high.

I think they just got rid of the separate Sonnet usage on Max plans (in preparation for Sonnet 5?) which is unfortunate because it made subagent workflows really feels nearly unlimited.

Is 5.5 high the equivalent of opus 4.8 high though? I thought the naming has diverged and gpt 5.5 high = opus 4.8 max

The newest GPT (not public yet) just added a max option too.

That's interesting because about a month ago, I noticed Claude Code starting to use about 5x as many tokens. Just my rough estimate.

In my work with Claude Code vs Cursor+Gpt55, Claude is noticeably slower and more expensive.

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