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Comment by jeffnash | Hacker News Reader

At this point, the deciding factors for me between Claude Code 20x and Codex Pro 20x are:

1/ Usage limits: downstream of input/output cost, but resets and obscure windows and odd 20x plan / 5x plan != 4x usage math throw a wrench into it. Winner right now is Codex by a mile, especially when you factor in the fact that ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan. Always a bummer when asking if I should see a doctor about a rash means I can't code as much. It's also is a godsend if you use an MCP like oracle to automate the process of calling the Pro model on particularly tough problems, giving better planning results or deeper code analysis without burning usage.

2/ Context window in the harness. Claude Code wins on this. There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing (ETA: noname120 pointed out this is no longer the case and it can be enabled again [1]). 252k is just not enough. Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that even a model as powerful as Astra sometimes loses the plot on long-running tasks.

3/ Ability to use the plan outside of the official harness. Codex wins. Anthropic does shit like bills requests as extra usage if it sees a hermes.md in a commit.

I've subscription hopped a bunch, and at times I've had both, but I keep coming back to Codex because it wins on 2/3.

ETA: apparently I haven't been Keeping Up With the Altmans and new 20x signups have been disabled for a few weeks. I am grandfathered in, which makes the comparison above pretty much moot.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806060

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> Usage limits [...] Winner right now is Codex by a mile

This hasn't been the case since around July. If you measure usage in raw api costs, Anthropic is actually giving more on $200 than OpenAI now. This includes resets. Usage allocation difference would be humiliating for codex subs were it not for resets. But fixing usage limits with resets is ugly, and they're not good for your mental well-being.

> Context window in the harness

Codex now allows 1M for subs with config params. But generally speaking, you shouldn't really be using 1M context. If you accidentally send a request with say, ~700k context already accumulated in a session which is outside cache TTL, you're paying full cost of these 700k tokens.

> I've subscription hopped a bunch

OpenAI actually has a new strategy to prevent subscription hopping after their 2-3 month-long marketing push to get claude-folks to switch over:

you can't buy a $200 sub anymore. So if you cancel, you won't be able to get back in. Hostage situation, essentially.

EDIT: re: usage limits, oh-my-pi maintainer has been tracking this - https://nitter.xitter.cc/_can1357/status/2090075496948060372

> you can't buy a $200 sub anymore

Are you sure?

Yes.

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2098113585683808624

That is an old tweet. They since reenabled it. I know because I was on the $200/month plan and couldn't resub once it expired. However, a couple days ago it finally let me resub again.

Now, if they disabled it yet again, that's another story. But that tweet is not evidence of that.

I have been attempting to get on the $200 sub for a while. It was not available for me a few days ago, and checking again now, it is still not available.

That's too bad. I wonder why I was able to get it after days of not being able to. They must've just temporarily enabled it again. Probably worth checking a few times a day to see if it reappears.

Though with the price of GPT-6 Luna, the temptation to switch to pay-per-token grows.

You can resub on that plan if you've been on it before. They aren't taking new subs on that plan for the time being.

There was/is a loophole where if you signed up via the iOS or Android app, it allowed it.

It's been disabled for some time now though otherwise, I check about once a day myself and keep and eye out on social media.

Annoying since I was about to upgrade back to the $200 plan after downgrading to the $100 plan due to being on leave and not needing as much usage the month prior. Doh.

I think what they did was allow resubs for users who already had $200 sub before.

Just checked my toy chatgpt account that only ever had a $20 sub. $200 plan still shows "The 20X plan is temporarily unavailable for purchase".

I’ve been a Claude user, switched to Codex expecting usage limits to be more loose but I can’t even get through a basic sysadmin task on the $20 plan using Sol medium before I hit the 5hr one.

I think I’m gonna move back to a Claude plan. I could barely hit the $200 limit if I went non-stop on programming tasks.

I do the bulk of work on Sol Medium/Low and don't have that experience on the $20 plan. If you said Astra I'd agree it's easy to burn through the 5 hours even on the lower reasoning levels.

Do you have /fast enabled by any chance?

I don’t think so, I’ve seen it suggest I try it. I’ll double check when I get home though.

I was considering the $100 plan, but I hit the 5hr limit in an hour. So even with the $100 plan I figured I cant go non-stop on a single agent running Sol Medium

Sorry if I am misunderstanding you, but I am pretty sure the $100 plan doesn’t have a 5hr usage limit. So, if that was what was preventing you from going non-stop, it might be worth it.

I am considering the plan myself. I just don’t know if I want to fork out $100 per month for something I will make $0 off of.

Thanks for the info, I didn’t know that about the 5hr limit

I think OpenAI essentially executed a bait-and-switch here, and they've lost a lot of goodwill with me, like Anthropic did, before them.

When they started the aggressive campaign, entire X (including myself, sadly) was full of posts about how "unlimited" codex usage is even on a $20 plan. Sam Altman was posting something in line of "we love our users, unlike Anthropic". Got my network to get codex subs because of the value compared to claude.

Then they gradually reduced the limits to the point where even $200 plan only lasts you just 1-2 days and $20 is basically unusable, then the hostage thing.

I remember Tibo Sottiaux telling people on X how OI doesn't believe in 5 hour limit just a day or two before OI adopted it.

tbf that's only for the pro plan, not the two max plans

I think the models getting dumber impacted that too, after a couple weeks both sol and Luna felt notably worse to me than they did at release

> Then they gradually reduced the limits to the point where even $200 plan only lasts you just 1-2 days

what? im on the $100 plan and ive literally never run out of usage, and thats mostly running Astra high.

maybe its the harness

I've run into hitting limits on the personal plan perhaps twice since the beginning of the year. But also I don't use the personal plan for coding tasks between 7am-noon M-F.

similar here: I tried Codex $20/mo on a trial and I ran out of 5hr usage mid way through a medium complexity task on a medium size model twice and gave up there. I don’t recall the equiv Claude plan being anything like that. Anecdata, but not great for OAI if they actually want to retain people on a trial.

You don't get Fable on Claude 20 USD plan. You get Sol on equivalent Codex plan.

You meant Astra, not Sol, I think. But Opus 5.5 is slightly better than Fable and Astra now.

Indeed, it's Astra now and Sol before. All SOTA models are always available in their cheapest plan.

Opus 5.5 is better in benchmarks, but has substantially less parameters so is world knowledge cannot compare against Fable or Astra.

Astra is barely usable even on the $100 plan. And that is if it doesn't just burn through 80% of your weekly quota in a couple of hours by continually expanding the scope of the task you gave it - while not noticing the failing tests that are right in front of it.

Opus is at least actually usable even on the small plan. The main downside is its insane writing style, but 5.5 seems to address that somewhat. Otherwise, you can just use your $20 OpenAI plan to have Luna de-slop Opus' prose, which seems to work fine.

I have a Claude Code hook that calls codex for a code review on commit time (Codex is set to Astra Medium) and it's been pretty good in general. It sometimes hits the 5hr limit but most of the time it provides really good feedback and because it's a completely different model it's mostly complementary to what Fable/Opus do themselves. IMHO it's been $20 well spent.

...but the few times I've tried to use codex for a moderately difficult task it burned through its limit extremely quickly.

But you don't get Fable on Claude 20 USD plan, then why compare it Sol on Codex 20 USD?

Sol is their middle model. Luna is smallest. And Astra is big, their Fable equivalent.

My code review benchmark put Sol 5.6 on the same performance tier as Fable 5.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/code-reviewing-lone-...

Sol is OpenAI's Opus, and Astra is OpenAI's Fable. Both pricing-wise, and performance-wise.

On the $20 plan, you can't use Sol for much more than planning and review. Luna xhigh for the rest. Have Sol write the plan specifically for Luna so it adds more direction and validation to the plan.

Given that Anthropic models are very verbose and OpenAI models can be very concise, wouldn't a count of expected task completions be a better measurement than raw API costs?

Perhaps. But Sol/Astra also likes dumping pages of jargon-packed content at me, so I'm not sure it's that much different. I actually still prefer the way Fable talks to me, even considering the horrible claudisms.

But even if we leave that aside, OpenAI models are also much more eager than Anthropic, which are on the lazier side. Left unsupervised, Sol/Astra will attempt to build a sha256 verified rocket ship if you ask them to fix a race condition in your to-do list app. Anthropic models will do what you asked for, maybe even forget to implement parts of that ask, but they won't generally throw a slop granade at you.

I can leave Fable orchestrator unsupervised for ~2h. Leaving Sol/Astra unsupervised for ~2h means the next user turn will contain a message: "what are you doing and why?".

I think the problem with Anthropic's plan is that Fable just destroys it. If you stick to Opus and below, the $200 plan goes from "using 50% of the weekly quota on the first day" to something much more reasonable.

Do you have a source on the first note? I switched away from Claude around July because of how bad the usage limits were, and Codex gave me easily double the amount of usage per task completed. Would be interested to see if that's no longer the case.

Added link in edit. OMP maintainer has several claude and codex subs and he's been tracking usage since around July.

I haven't been tracking, but this roughly matches my experience with codex 20x and claude 20x subs. Claude subscription now lasts me 3-3.5 days on average. Codex is 2-2.5 days. This is work on same projects, with similarly sized tasks.

To make matters worse, I've merged a lot more code produced by fable than sol/astra.

I'm not sure the tokens can be compared like that between OpenAI/Anthropic.

When i swapped between a 200k Fable context into an Astra model (i was out of fable) the token usage in that context dropped to 150k or something.

Either there was a bug somewhere, or the same text got cut up very differently between providers.

That 50k was almost certainly accumulated encrypted reasoning tokens that would have been unreadable by astra.

Ah that makes sense.

To add my anecdote, while the Codex subscription appears to get you much fewer tokens as measured by cost, I find the amount of actual useful work that can be done by both subs to be about equal. Codex seems much less prone to burning millions of tokens just reading the codebase and doing nothing useful. That also makes it much quicker. Plus it actually does what I tell it with few mistakes first time, so less rework needed.

The Claude TUI is just so much better though so I'm hoping Opus 5.5 is actually good and not just benchmaxxed.

Anthropic has a separate meter for Fable. I used to get like five Fable sessions per week and that's it.

OpenAI has no such nonsense. No separate meter. No five hour limits. I get to use Astra at max effort on literally every task if I want to, and even this somehow lasts me several days.

Anthropic got caught playing stupid "20x refers to the 5h limit" word games with their customers. Meanwhile, I have statistically verified that OpenAI Pro 20x = 4 * Pro 5x = 20 * Plus, exactly as advertised.

I quantified cybersecurity lockouts on my code review benchmark and they were significantly lower on OpenAI:

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/code-reviewing-lone-...

My benchmark also suggests even OpenAI's Sol models can match Fable performance at a fraction of the cost.

OpenAI also used to have a ton of very nice features: unlimited chat separate from codex, allowing turns to finish even at 0% usage remaining. Sadly these got removed after abuse.

As a former Anthropic customer, OpenAI is simply the better company. There is no way around it. Good place to be while the chinese open weights models catch up. Claude is good but it doesn't make up for Anthropic's shenanigans.

OpenAI has 5 hour limits on the $20 plan. I agree about cybersecurity refusals though.

> If you accidentally send a request with say, ~700k context already accumulated in a session which is outside cache TTL, you're paying full cost of these 700k tokens.

Thinking aloud:

The harness UI should probably implement a timer that shows whether you are still within Cache TTL since your last turn of the conversation.

Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

While you're understandably not including the values of the $20 standard plans on both, I find the generosity of then token limits on ChatGPT plus vs Claude Pro (it's a huge difference) to be good representation of their respective attitudes towards the average user. You literally cannot use Claude pro to build real software, unless you're extremely frugal with your prompts and don't try anything even a little ambitious.

Also, Anthropic has zero models comparable to Luna.

Reasons for this?

> Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

Their responses towards using their subscriptions on opencode for one. Second, Dario just has a habit of making completely doomer comments on the future of software engieering as a job and towards the open-weights model ecosystem.

Sure, he's free to say whatever especially considering the amount of revenue he's creating, but it's just an altitude that I prefer not to see.

And Sam is better?

Significantly.

Sam is sketchier on a personal level, but judged just on the words coming out of their mouths, he's also much less paternalistic/controlling and more customer focused.

I think any amount of 'paternalistic/controlling' turns out to have been justified when, after dismantling the safety teams and pretending not to know what safety is, OpenAI had the HuggingFace series of scandals. You can dislike the idea of safety and people talking about safety, but not only is the evidence right there, but OpenAI came out shamefacedly and literally agreed with Amodei's statements, including that they agreed to pace the frontier.

Your entire recent comeback history is defenses of Anthropic. Do you work for them?

It isn't, and no.

I think opencode subscription issue is just a different marketing strategy. Neither company wants it, but OpenAI believes it's worth it as a marketing expense in the long run.

And Dario's "AI will kill us all" is the same as Sam's "AI will discover ALL science and we'll be building Dyson spheres".

Different flavors of the same BS.

The first one terrifies people who really don't need to be. It's deeply unethical.

I think if they truly believe it's happening we generally want to encourage them to be honest with the public, though, don't we? We've spent decades complaining about ceos not being honest in the public risks that they see

Last week he said they should pause research and today there just released newer and better models. His talk is completely meaningless.

He didn't say they were pausing research. You might have only read the social media responses to his essay, not the essay itself. Social media seems even less accurate than usual when it comes to anything AI related.

They are both companies I'd rather not support. Not that our support for them has any material impact. NVIDIA is bankrolling them directly and indirectly.

> Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

They're both pretty horrible, but I find it difficult to find arguments for why Anthropic is worse than OpenAI, other than their doomtrolling. Which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't even register.

Edit: forgot about the SpaceX thing.

OpenAI has been way more open with users using their subscription plans on 3rd party tools.

That alone is reason enough. Also, I don't think either of them are horrible. That's honestly a ridiculous take considering how much people in here love their models, and how much they've advanced the industry forward.

> Also, I don't think either of them are horrible. That's honestly a ridiculous take considering how much people in here love their models

That's a non-sequitur.

"Nestle is a great company, considering how much people love their chocolate."

How about you tell me what makes the horrible then. There's pluses and minuses to both obviously, almost everyone around me have positive experiences with the product. They've innovated at a pace unheard of before 2026, and for openAI specifically the amount of value they've provided to me and family members (who aren't even developers in the slightest) has far outweighed the supposed horrible actions they've done.

Yeah I don't think the handling of copyrighted training data was correct, but I can't pretend I know what the correct solution to that issue is.

Speaking of OpenAI specifically, they don't price gouge people, they aren't aggressively anti-competitive, they're not nearly the perpetual hypocrisy machine that Anthropic is (which is one thing I actually really dislike).

Regarding Nestle, it's pretty obvious that the sentiment towards them is a lot more negative and they aren't universally loved by any group of people. Processed foods are by and large garbage nobody needs. Their use of forced labor is denounced by just about everyone. What have OpenAI/Anthropic done that's even similar in scope to the forced labor / modern slavery that people hate Nestle for.

If you had a company that genuinely helped hundreds of millions of people worldwide become more productive and more satisfied with their tools, and the overall sentiment towards your products within the industry is positive, then what argument would there be that your company is "horrible"? At least give some decent counter arguments.

> What have OpenAI/Anthropic done that's even similar in scope

You mean aside from "the largest theft of labor in human history"[1]?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/technology/microsoft-open...

For me the first point, openness to 3rd party, is the decider. I don’t want to build tooling around a completely closed model. I liked being able to use pi, and now I exclusively use my own harness which I modify the way I want. Not possible with Anthropic subscription.

100% agree.

I often have the urge to design my own harness too (once I have more time). But even with the current mainstream harnesses out there, there's just to many hurdles if you wanted to mainly stick with anthropic models and need the subsidized pricing (from a sub).

They are both killing people / aiming for murder bots, aren't they?

> aiming for murder bots

Anthropic prohibits the use of claude models for development of lethal technology afaik eg [1].

[1] https://www.epc.eu/publication/the-pentagon-blacklisted-anth...

But only in a fully autonomous way, they have nothing against mass surveillance outside of US and killing non-autonomously... I feel like that's also quite a low bar, but apparently enough for them to get bullied.

> why Anthropic is worse than OpenAI

Anthropic is trying to kill open models way harder

OpenAI just wants to make money, perhaps through underhanded tactics if they can get away with it.

Anthropic does all that but they're also populated by many people who believe they are building God and that they must build their god first in their own image so that it can take control of humanity and protect us from any competing god which is not built in their image. Their position is inherently paternalistic and authoritarian, and they consider suppression of competition not just important to the bottom line but to life in the universe. Under the doomer ethos there is no evil too great to rationalize.

There are plenty of wrongs done in the name of profit, but capitalists have nothing on zealots in terms of causing serious harm. Profit motives can be directed by influencing incentives, but zealotry is frequently terminal.

That isn't to say that there isn't some overlap-- the cultists have infected both organizations. But OpenAI has pretty consistently only given lip service to AI doom to the extent that it improves the bottom line, while (mis)Anthropic was founded specifically because OpenAI wasn't mentally ill enough.

Well said. The superiority complexes from the Anthropic messaging on their presentations/blogs/articles is just too much, even for a frontier AI company.

Anthropic has great products, but it's not meaningfully better to 99% of devs that I'd rather support the company that doesn't constantly act in opposition to optimism and to the vibe I'd prefer for a 100 billion dollar (or however ridiculous amount they're worth now) tech company embraces.

AI doomerism is a genuine waste of time if you aren't actively pushing towards a better AI industry for everyone, not just the groups in full ideological alignment to your personal leanings.

You'd rather literally support <i>Sam Altman>/i>? I mean, that's a position to take, for sure, but apparently several people still use Grok, so maybe it's not all that surprising.

"You literally cannot use Claude pro to build real software, unless you're extremely frugal with your prompts and don't try anything even a little ambitious" - that's way past ridiculous. Even just using Fable most of the time, working on several ambitious projects, I have a hard time hitting the limit with a Max plan.

Lol Grok users catching strays here. I enjoy it and it has built some nice things for me as a hobbyist. The attitude of the company is more just quietly build cool things rather than Anthropic's holier-than-thou condescending attitude coupled with the over the top self-serving doomerism.

> You literally cannot use Claude pro to build real software

Interestingly I would have drawn the exact opposite conclusion looking at my Claude and codex usage.

I can't get anything sustained out of codex in chatgpt plus, while I have been using Claude pro extensively and put on a lot of experimental task and features.

I ran into codex exhausting a 5h window on code review in minutes (like 3minutes) multiple times, while I could get Claude to implement 2~3 medium sized features with the same usage consumption.

(I also really dislike the usage resets in codex, they always make me feel like I use them wrong because I often just want to reset the 5h window, but they can only do both at once...)

> It's also is a godsend if you use an MCP like oracle to automate the process of calling the Pro model on particularly tough problems

As far as I know Codex (at least the GUI) can automatically call the ChatGPT Chat models (including Astra 6 Pro), you just need to @ a ChatGPT Chat conversation from within Codex and tell it when to use it.

> There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing

Not true, it works again[1]. I confirm that it works both on 5.6 Sol and Astra 6, possibly other models too.

[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2089082893804896524

I actually haven't played with the GUI. I probably should now that the Linux version is in beta. My situation is kind of the reverse: I like using oracle to basically zip up my repo, ask GPT Pro to propose some sort of design or refactor based on the code, then provide a step by step implementation plan for a cheaper model to implement directly in a harness on my machine. It often takes upwards of 90 minutes to come up with something but I've never been disappointed by the results. I suppose I could do this and then save a step by referencing the oracle-created thread with the @ you mentioned

And re: the toml workaround, AWESOME! I appreciate you pointing these two things out, this is my highest-ROI HN comment thus far.

> Ability to use the plan outside of the official harness. Codex wins. Anthropic does shit like bills requests as extra usage if it sees a hermes.md in a commit.

I'm quite puzzled about why Anthropic is so hellbent on blocking other coding agents. It's not like Claude Code has any secret sauce, right? And doesn't Anthropic make monkey off API usage, and their magic is on the model side anyway?

They want to lock people into using the Claude Code ecosystem to make switching to other providers more difficult.

It's for lock-in - same reason why it took them so long to finally support AGENTS.md.

But to be fair, they don't really enforce the harness rule that much anymore. I guess if your harness doesn't do a lot of weird things like a lot of cache misses, or triggers some distillation attacks, or some broader Chinese fingerprints, they're tongue-in-cheek okay with you using a third party harness.

You can use Claude’s subscription in Pi now? Last I tried it opted for extra usage.

Not natively, as it's still a ToS violation and adding that in pi would go against pi principles, but there are many plugins/proxies that make it work.

oh-my-pi supports it natively (again, still a ToS violation), by impersonating claude code's fingerprints.

I have been using oh-my-pi with 3 claude subs for the past few months without any issues. Even native server-side OAI/ANT compaction works out of the box.

It's pretty unclear because they have two somewhat competing sets of documentation but I believe using the agent sdk with a harness like pi is not against the ToS if it's for yourself.

omp is definitely against ToS though

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK.

Yes, you need an extension that uses the claude code credentials from the file system, like this: https://github.com/fdietze/pi-claude-auth

Works pretty well for me, even with latest opus-5-5

Originally it was because Anthropic was so compute constrained they relied on the extra care the Claude harness took with caching (heavy use of cache breakpoints etc) that other harnesses didn't.

I think that is less of a factor now, and I think Anthropic have backed off some on being as strict (eg, AFAIK they never implemented the two-tier "claude -p" pricing model they were planning)

This feels like a horrible precedent. Billing based on data like commits feels like it opens the door to tech stack based billing in general - could we see different prices for people who use other devtools Anthropic doesn't like? Makes me feel grateful for open models

Meridian and DirectSDK work well to use a Claude MAX subscription in alternative harnesses.

In my personal experience I currently get a lot, lot more usage on the 5x Claude plan than the 5x Codex plan.

Having limitless webUI ChatGPT usage is much better user experience, though. I'll give them that.

(edit: Sol-6 is half the price, so maybe the usage limits are going to be way better.)

I've been using Claude Pro and recently gave Codex a try again. Both on the $20 plans. I get so much more usage with Claude. It's night and day for me. Codex runs out constantly, whereas Claude I hit limits very rarely.

Assuming you are doing coding, I'm curious how would you characterize tne majority of your work (language, domain, frontend/backend, etc)?

iOS development mostly. I'm using the Pro plans as it's work on personal projects outside my day job and I'm able to get just enough usage from those plans to get me through each day.

Same here, especially as I stick with Opus 4.6. My usage limits truly feel limitless, I can just hammer a task over and over again until completion.

Meanwhile I just burned ~20% of my weekly quota with Astra making one config file for a service.

I'm actually interested to see how the token discount maps to the usage limit consumption. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if they're making up the discount and resultant load increase on the API end by reducing effective usage on the subscription end.

> Winner right now is Codex by a mile

Opposite in my experience. I need to limit codex to 500k on medium/low, still run out in 2-3 days with 1 CLI window. CC gives me 4-5 medium/high days with 2-3 CLI windows, and Opus is still great for other regular dumb engineering/refactoring.

On the other hand my head starts to hurt if I read Opus for too long, hopefully they fixed it with 5.5.

This is my experience. After months of hearing how Codex limits were way higher I bumped to the $100/mo plan after hitting my limits a day early on Claude due to some heavy usage + Fable (not normal for me, I often fit nicely in the $200/mo plan). I hit the usage limit in a day with a single agent running on codex and the tiny context window was stifling. Yes, I'm comparing a $100 to a $200 plan but I extrapolated the usage (4x'd it) and it still wasn't close, I got way more done with Opus.

Using Agentsview (which might have it's own issues) I was getting ~$200 of API usage in my 1 week Codex window (paid $100) vs ~$5,000 of API usage in 1 week for Claude (paid $200).

Maybe it's due to 20x / 5x != 4 but I have the $200/mo Claude and $100/mo Codex and I get _way_ less usage on Codex, well under 1/4th the usage. In 1-2 days of semi-heavy _single_ agent usage with Sol High I can burn through my whole week of Codex. Again, this is not running multiple agents, just 1 at a time.

Compare that to Claude and I can run multiple agents on Opus almost indefinitely. YMMV of course but I was shocked at how quickly I burned through Codex usage.

On the context window, I feel so cramped on Codex, compacting happening every time I turn around is annoying. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed the Claude context window size.

Same experience. Have both subs. It's just not true anymore that Codex gives you more usage than Claude.

Makes me think they picked Codex, stopped trying Claude, and just hang on to outdated beliefs about the value they're receiving.

Isn’t that to be expected when comparing one 20x plan to another 5x plan?

I am curious how the 5x plans differ between both providers.

I have 5x on both of them. I get way more use from CC than Codex. Actually as we speak, I exhausted my Codex limit twice in the last two days. I am living on banked resets right now.

> "Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that..."

I appreciate and follow Matt Pocock's advice: avoid autocompaction. Compaction is lossy, which is ok when you're managing it at phase boundaries, but autocompact is lossy at the most inopportune times, firing mid-task and leading to agents going off the rails.

Bad advice, compaction is why Codex is so fantastic.

My conversations compact hundreds of times. By the time it has done a dozen or so compactions, it fully understands the work I want it to do (and how). It's almost like having a fine-tuned Astra model.

10/10, would recommend.

I'm not sure I follow; how is autocompaction (lossy summarization), applied at random times (vs strategically, between workflow phases), helpful to ensuring clarity of intent? Maybe you're saying that just plowing ahead and living with the signal loss along the way works well enough for your purposes. In which case, ok, YMMV, different strokes.... but paying attention to context quality and being deliberate about when to compact vs handoff vs delegate to subagents is most definitely not "bad advice".

I agree with @erichocean on this. In theory, compaction is bad. But in practice I found the model is smart enough to write critical details down somewhere, and post-compaction the model doesn't make assumptions. A small amount of time is lost reading materials, but the benefit is that you can operate unbounded vs doing small controlled chunks, which is what I used to do with Opus back in the day. Now I just give it as big a task as I can think of.

not my experience at all. compaction during a task is fatal since you lose all of the details of edits and progress halfway through. compacting after task completion is fine though.

This approach got good with Sol. With 5.5 I'd break tasks up, record planning docs, etc.

Now with Sol I rarely bother. It's really good at remembering the salient details. Its also great at continuing a pattern I setup, like commit after finishing each feature block, etc.

Usage is actually Claude now because of Opus 5.5 since it a better model that Astra. I maxed out my 200$ Claude plan with 10b token on Opus 5 and 5.5 is cheaper. I maxed out two Codex accounts with like not even 5b tokens.

Have you used 10b/5b tokens over the course of a week or over the course of a month?

It was 9.4B to be exact and it was over the course of two days lol. It was between two projects so 99% of them were cached reads.

The GPT was about 1B on two projects on 300$ worth of plans all on Astra and I capped out on usage.

Anthropic caching must be better because the cache rates are better on Claude models.

Astra planner/designer with Sol+Luna subagents has worked well for me to improve context continuity. Luna generates code, Sol reviews code and runs/monitors integration/E2E tests. It's about 20% more usage efficient and 20% faster to finish tasks. I've been very subagent-skeptic for a while but the economics of codegen with Luna have made it click. This just works in Codex with a single-line AGENTS.md instruction.

Do you mind sharing? I would love to give it a try and see if I can stretch the x5 plan further.

How do you do this?

Tell the model, spawn a <model_n> to do <task_n> and it will do it

I dunno about Codex-the-application itself, but you can definitely use e.g. Pi with the larger context windows with a Codex login. It puts a pretty large multiplier on credit usage, however.

I've been doing this, my only experience with codex was brutal usage wise and i just retreated back to pi pretty quickly so the credit usage i'm receiving is kinda all im familiar with. Surely seems like less than CC, but i guess not using codex makes my experience kinda not valid for comparing usage.

And ya i can go over that 240k limit, I still very seldom do, and try to treat it as the actual limit. I'm surprised to see so many people still talking about compaction to complete long running tasks, i think the bulk of the work should be somewhat frontloaded into a plan that is split off into subplans, then you can kinda open up a few options, one session with subagents for the subplans of the main plan, or just handoff prompts about progress against the main plan/relevant subplan. I just never trust the blackbox that is compaction, I feel its a recipe for disaster/context poison.

Codex/ChatGPT Pro 20x isn't really a thing now, they have disabled it a week or two ago.

It’s back available since 4 days ago.

It's not as of 4 minutes ago: https://chatgpt.com/pricing/

OpenAI have seemed compute-constrained recently, leading to their subscriptions actually being less generous than Claude as of late. OpenAI even paused purchases of 20x plans.

It's extremely variable because the products are roughly equivelant, and a lot of the quality of service depends on their inference capacity at any given hour/day.

Not that I disagree that Codex wins out, but the deciding factor actually is - Codex Pro 20x is not available for purchase, indefinitely. So, what's the point of this discussion? People who already have the 20x sub are unlikely to cancel, and the rest of us can't access it.

I purchased mine using Apple's in-app subscription. I just checked and it is still there.

> especially when you factor in ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan.

I’m currently on the 5x plan and burned through 5% today on a difficult task in 15 minutes so I doubt that. If you got the wrong kind of tasks that you work on, it can go fast.

I realized I missed a few words here: I meant "especially when you factor in the fact that ChatGPT usage is unmetered", i.e. you get unlimited ChatGPT threads that don't eat into your codex limit

But did you use ChatGPT chat or the work mode? Only the former is unmetered at least for me as well.

What are you talking about? ChatGPT unmetered? No way! That was 2 months ago perhaps and it’s possible your account still hasn’t gotten the new limits. I noticed around 1 month ago I was still going full throttle on my codex subscription and my limits were barely budging, and then all of sudden people around me started to complain about limits. I thought they’re crazy, but then my account go the hammer, and that was it. If I have the same pattern of usage like I did before, basically having an agent working continuously on a coding take, my weekly limit goes in 2 days.

Interesting, rolling out new limits would explain a lot. Where did you hear this? I wonder if they detect users with multiple accounts and do that first.

It’s all anecdotal based on my experience and other countless discussions I have seen online. I’ve heard speculation that once they hit 20 million codex users capacity is tighter so they have to manage it. The previous limits were unsustainable compared to token pricing.

On usage in ChatGPT settings, I see: Plan limits Shared across Codex, Work, Workspace Agents, and ChatGPT for Excel. Chat conversations are not included.

Is this not the default anymore? I am on the (now closed) 20x plan.

That’s the default. I didn’t express myself clearly but I thinking your situation is not the common case anymore, or perhaps you are not using it hard enough. Codex limits deplete very fast these days, it’s not “unlimited”.

I am saying that because ChatGPT usage is unlimited, I don't have to eat into my Codex limits when I use ChatGPT. Codex certainly has limits. Last time I had a Claude sub (hedging here since much of the info in my comment was outdated), my usage limits on claude.ai threads was shared with Claude Code.

Finally got the nuance. Indeed the chat part of the subscription is unlimited as far as I know. Now that part of your comment makes sense!

Sorry about that, I accidentally a word (hope that reference doesn't date me)

Codex used to rule in the usage limit front, but GPT-6-Astra eats up quota like crazy.

theres a popular thread on claudecode or claudai subreddit that proves 20x isnt really 20x. apparently its a marketing gimmick and the recommended solution is two 5x plans > 20x at greater than half the cost of the 20x

> Claude Code 20x and Codex Pro 20x

That isn't a valid comparison, since Codex 20x is closed. So we should be comparing Claud 20x to Codex 5x + credits.

Also in Codex, even though you can increase the context window to 1m so its on par with Claude, exceeding the default is billed at 2x.

You’re sharing outdated info

Care to be specific? 20x is closed. And the 2x pricing is literally on the pricing sheet for gpt-6 astra, sol and luna.

The info you’re citing is for API not Codex

> that ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan

LMAO, I wish this were true, I hit limits (and the "we are disabling access to protect your data" warnings) all the time, or have chats just...fuck off and get into weird/invalid states (interrupted chats, chats that are spinning and stuck, returning "/mnt/" paths instead of images/md files, file links being returned with no file backing them, image classifier firing...and then returning the image anyway (though now I know that GPT-Image-X really really wants to generate NSFW even when that isn't the request)).

Though I am probably an outlier, I have both 20x Claude/ChatGPT plans and max both out every week, so... (in my defense I am a hobbyist and this is out-of-pocket)

What’s this mcp oracle thing?

> Codex's compaction is very good

I think it’s only very good in comparison to some of the utter crap that came before it.

Today I had Codex compaction trigger after I had given an instruction but before it acted on the instruction, and the instruction just disappeared completely. The agent reported that the task was done without actually doing it.

cool! for me its company ethics

I don't think either of these companies are great, then, but Anthropic is surely worse. The doom marketing is one of the most unethical things an AI company can be doing.

tell that nonsense to Huggingface.

OpenAI and Anthropic are neck and neck: https://www.felonybench.com/

That's a nonsensical website. A third party was responsible for both OpenAI's and Anthropic's model escapes. The difference is that Anthropic was warning that this might happen, and OpenAI was putting their head in the sand.

Your entire comment history really is just this, huh.

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