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Comment by rudedogg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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