Alex Finn

Charlie Marsh

Hacking with Swift

<h2>The reset treadmill</h2>
<p>Since GPT-5.6 Sol launched, OpenAI has reset Codex and ChatGPT Work usage limits at least 35 times, averaging once every 8.9 days — though lately it’s been closer to daily. A community tracker has been logging every announcement, and the reasons range from outage compensation to milestone celebrations to what the announcer, OpenAI’s @thsottiaux, sometimes just calls “Oops… I did it again.”</p>
<p>The 5-hour session cap is also gone, at least for now, for Plus and Pro subscribers. That’s a bigger deal than the resets. One developer described giving GPT-5.6 Sol “months of work for a human” and watching it grind through it over four hours without hitting a wall. That kind of sustained run wasn’t possible before.</p>
<h2>The growth numbers</h2>
<p>Codex went from under 1 million users in February to 8 million by mid-July, then hit 9 million, then 10 million — each milestone announced with another usage reset. ChatGPT Work and Codex together were reportedly adding roughly 1 million users every few days at peak. That pace doubled OpenAI’s previous traffic record within 48 hours and caused real problems: context window reductions, billing bugs, multi-agent behavior patches. The resets started partly as compensation for those issues.</p>
<h2>Why the constant resets?</h2>
<p>The official framing is gratitude and compensation. The less charitable read: retention. When a power user burns through their weekly quota on Tuesday, they have two choices — wait until the reset, or switch to a competitor. Frequent resets remove that pressure point. OpenAI isn’t the only one doing this; Anthropic extended Claude’s promotional pricing and raised Claude Code limits by 50% around the same time.</p>
<p>There’s a real tension here. Some users love it — one developer described the feeling as “euphoric,” listing four simultaneous projects they’re running in parallel, from a SaaS product to an autonomous game studio. Others find the unpredictability annoying. If you don’t know when the next reset is coming, you either hoard quota or burn it frantically. Neither is a great way to work.</p>
<p>One power user put it bluntly: if resets happen often enough that they lose all meaning, they might actually push people to downgrade their plans. Why pay for Pro if the limits are effectively the same as Plus after the next reset?</p>
<h2>What’s actually changed for developers</h2>
<p>With the 5-hour cap removed, longer autonomous runs are now practical. One tip circulating: if you’re using Codex, increase <code>max_threads</code> in <code>~/.codex/config.toml</code> beyond the default of 6, since the agent can now spawn more subagents without hitting the session wall.</p>
<pre><code class="language-toml"><span class="hljs-section">[agents]</span>
<span class="hljs-attr">max_threads</span> = <span class="hljs-number">16</span>
</code></pre>
<p>The compaction problem — where long sessions would lose context and start producing garbage — has also reportedly improved in version 5.6. Agents can work for extended periods without the quality degrading the way it used to.</p>
<h2>The competitive picture</h2>
<p>OpenAI has largely reclaimed the perception of leading in AI coding, at least among mainstream developers. Anthropic still has strong developer goodwill, and open-source alternatives like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K2.7 are gaining ground with teams that care about data control. But the raw user numbers suggest most people are staying where the limits are loosest.</p>
<p>The resets will probably slow down eventually. Shared resource pools are still the real bottleneck for heavy users, and indefinite daily resets aren’t a sustainable business model. For now, though, the window is open — and apparently some people are building entire game studios through it.</p>


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OpenAI has rolled out a full reset of usage limits for ChatGPT Work and Codex, with some higher-tier users reporting what appears to be daily resets going forward. The reset was announced by OpenAI's Thomas Sottiaux and attributed to new team member Raj Nagarwal. Heavy users are advised to take advantage of the more generous limits to push through ambitious projects rather than conserving tokens.

ChatGPT Work and Codex usage limits reset, with daily resets reported by some users