The rate limits are confusing
Resolved 💬 9 comments Opened Nov 26, 2025 by zzylol Closed Dec 2, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of the VS Code extension are you using?
0.4.30
What subscription do you have?
plus
Which IDE are you using?
vs code
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 25.1.0 arm64 arm
What issue are you seeing?
The rate limits look like they are decreasing from 100% to 0% but sometimes they increase from lower values to the larger ones, which is very confusing. Could you fix this?
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Installing the VS Code CodeX extension and login with an account.
What is the expected behavior?
_No response_
Additional information
_No response_
9 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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Rate limits are enforced on a 5-hour basis. Within a 5-hour window, you will see the available tokens decrease from 100% downward. Think of it like a gas or battery charge gauge on a car. When the 5-hour window expires, the rate limit resets back up to 100% — similar to refilling your gas tank or recharging your battery. A similar rate limit is enforced on a weekly basis.
I hope that makes things clearer.
Thanks for your reply. However, I do observe today that the 5h and weekly limits were 0% and 25% at the beginning; after I used it for a while, they became 35% and 35%/11% respectively. 35%/11% means that the weekly limit is sometimes 35% and sometimes 11%.
You said that you observed 0% left in the 5h window and 25% left in the weekly window. I presume that you then waited until after the 5h reset time elapsed, since any attempt to issue new tasks prior to this would have resulted in an error. At the time of the 5h window reset, you should have been back to 100% for your 5h usage and still at 25% for your weekly usage. After issuing additional tasks, your 5h usage dropped from 100% down to 35%, and the weekly usage dropped from 25% down to 11%. Do I have that right?
I think the usage observation happens within a 3-hour window. I'm not sure if it goes back to 100% for the 5h, but it looks like the weekly usage seems weird as well (at least during 1 min observation where I did nothing with CodeX, it can show either 11% or 35%). Now, which is after 6 hours of my last message, the 5h usage is 3% and during the 6 hours, I just used CodeX with one message. I just wanted to mention that the limit seems to be going up and down together, which causes a bit of confusion. It's totally fine to just keep it there because it doesn't affect the main functions.
Not sure if it's the same, but I'm seeing confusing behavior in the rate limits too. Yesterday it said my rate limit will reset nov 29, while now it says it will reset Nov 30. It seems to randomly change sometimes. Also I had a few thousands credits that suddenly disappeared, but at the same time as the credits disappeared, my rate limits increased when it hit 0, so it seems the credits got converted to rate limits instead, but I'm not sure if this is what actually happened? Will credits automatically be converted to rate limits if you reach 0%?
@matssk, please refer to this thread.
I've been using Codex since May, developing an extremely complex cosmological inference software, among other things. Had Codex been metered the way it is since Nov 1st, this would have been impossible. Along with it and in it, I am developing a repo policy engine that is tailored specifically to the new capabilities of Codex - to engage in complex tasks, test, pre-commit, and push on success. A (complex, indeed) task that would've consumed 10-20% of the 5-hour before, now takes it all and doesn't even finish. The limits are unpredictable, unreliable, buggy and unfair. It randomly goes up and gets consumed just the way it was consumed back in October, I actually do a task, then it goes back to whatever state it was before bugging. On top of that, you gave us good-will credits, which you later expired. Greediness never brought nobody no good.
Today this single task got in a pytest quasi-loop fixing errors one by one and retesting, which consumed the entirety of my fresh 5hour limit and 30% of my weekly limit today. I am extremely frustrated and we all want to know why are resources wasted in such a way. The task is hung now and will probably continue its loop after the 5-hour limit resets - I hope, because it did a lot of work. It's not only about sidestepping us with the obviously stricter limits in first place - it's about wasting resources for tasks that don't even complete. Our resources, as well as your resources. It's about transparency, having a way to predict how much will a task consume, and providing a service that is actually usable. We've trained your models on unimaginable insanities and now you're shooting yourself in the leg, thinking that we'll all suddenly buy the Pro plan or $40 of credits that we have no way to budget.
For the time being Codex is deemed outright unusable by me - not by opinion, by fact - I can't make use of it... And we can't even go to the mini model on the web interface. All this is a joke.
Hope newer versions can solve the problem. I'm fine with closing the issue here.