I also put together this ridiculous thing[1] because I missed the font and color scheme of Claude.
[0] https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dmd/91e9ca98b2c252a185e8e...
I'm not entirely clear on the mechanism by which memories make it into context, so it's possible some of it isn't all the time, but it does seem to be working reasonably.
Again, it's not as good as Claude when it comes to writing "not like an AI". But it's significantly better than it was.
I can go through a 5-hour limit with a $20/mo Plus subscription in a few minutes with 5.5 Extra High. This causes me to reserve the latest/best rev for the harder problems.
5.5 really does seem to be very superior to 5.4, but it's also very expensive to run: The gas gauge moves fast. It's not very clearly defined whether 5.5 will cost less to get a problem solved quickly, or if a bunch of automatic iterations of 5.4 will solve it less-expensively. Both are often frustrating to me on the $20 plan.
(Also: Are you sure you're seeing it right? 5.5 has been in the wild for less than a month, so far. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/ )
Most of those commits since the last few months are thanks to Codex reviews (but the code is not AI generated): 5.5 since it came out, and 5.4 etc before that, almost always on Extra High because it's for a framework that underlies the other stuff I do so I want make to sure everything's correct.
Sometimes I have to run multiple passes on the same task: I rarely continue any session beyond 4-5 prompts to avoid "bloat" or accumulate "stale context", so sometimes Codex finds different stuff in subsequent reviews of the same file/subsystem.
The project is modular enough where each file can be considered standalone with only 1-2 dependencies, and I already used to write a lot of comments everywhere (something some people laughed at), so maybe that helps the AI along?
I'm taking this, along with my own experience, to mean that the GPTs are cheaper to use for refactors of an existing body of work than they are for creating a new one.
(And perhaps part of that is in the name? These "LLM" contraptions are very good at translation, after all. And tokens seem to relate more to concepts than to specific phrases or words.)
MAYBE the 50% overall is true, but the double usage during a 5 hour window i just dont see it at all. I've maxed 3 5 hour windows since this happened, 0% chance it was double as much as normal, i ate up about 4-5% of my weekly total each time(this was ~10% each time pre announcements). wish i could give token numbers but its obscured i just know it was around 120k 4.6 with some delegation to sonnet subagents.
So SURE its almost certainly more allotted weekly, but if those totals are consistent for 5 hour blocks, you gotta split your daily usage into at least 3 sessions with 5 hours between them to even hit that weekly limit. its unreal how much they have burned their good reputation in a 2 month stretch, i am positive its also being astroturfed with bots more than happy to advance the narrative.
the internet is annoying, these tools are overall cool, just wish anthropic would go back to being semi predictable.