Miles Brundage: Codex Ultra Fast burns budget in hours, widening the compute gap

Miles_Brundage · x · 2026-10-01

Former OpenAI policy lead Miles Brundage shares his experience with Codex: he almost never exhausted his Codex budget before (with Claude it happens more often), but the new Ultra Fast mode is so fast he can burn through it in a few hours, leaving him feeling compute-poor.

He argues developers now fall into roughly three compute tiers: free tier, paid tier, and employees at a handful of companies — and the gap between the second and third tiers has widened significantly with multi-agent workflows and now raw speed.

Related event: Ex-OpenAI exec feels "compute-poor" after trying Codex Ultra Fast(2 posts)→

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