I recently tried doing a fairly normal task for this codebase with codex, as I have seen a lot of people talking it up on here. A single task running for ~1-2 hours burned through over half of my usage for the week on the $125/month plan, not on a top model (I don't remember which one specifically I used). It struggled to get the basics done, then got absolutely stuck on a follow up. Handed it over to Claude and it 1-shot it.
But in the last few days something seems to have happened that made Codex's models massively stupider (for what I am doing).
Really weirdly, it suddenly refused to even run tests it previously wrote itself (and previously ran), because of some false positive about cybersecurity.
That by itself is not evidence of stupidity. Trying to make a 200+ file PR full of research notes is, and the PR didn't even solve the problem I asked it to.