Codex usage as bad as Claude
Posted on: 2026-04-22
A month ago I was writing:
I’ve ended up using Codex every day. Last weekend I even used it for 5 hours straight and never hit a limit.
That honeymoon phase lasted about three weeks. Lately, I’ve noticed I can barely use it for normal coding for more than 30 to 45 minutes before hitting a wall. Even worse, the weekly limit kicks in after just two of these short sessions.
I am appalled that a paid service can degrade so quickly. Normally, when you pay for a product, you expect a consistent level of service. However, Anthropic and OpenAI seem to change the rules of the game constantly, even within the same model tier.
Since I’ve already paid for the full year, I’m stuck with a tool that only allows for about two hours of coding per evening. Because these limits kept blocking me during the narrow three-hour windows I actually have available to code, I ended up subscribing to Cursor for another $20 a month. So, for $60 a month, I can finally manage a few 2–3 hour sessions per week and perhaps one longer session when time allows.
This experience has made me think deeply about the future of programming. As we become more dependent on these tools and as the cost rises (or the value for the price drops), we risk a future where only large corporations can afford to code efficiently. We are seeing the creation of a high barrier to entry in software development. We could reach a point where only the wealthy can afford the thousands of dollars per month required to build software at scale. Even if local models improve, the hardware costs remain out of reach for many. While we can always choose to write code manually at a slower pace, the time-to-market advantage is increasingly being consolidated into the hands of a few.