High token consumption with codex and 5.5

Yes, I agree with you. Today I also submitted a complaint because I believe Codex is misleading its users and basically robbing them. The interface says “5 hours of work,” but in real use with a serious project, that limit can be burned through in about an hour. So “5 hours per month” does not feel like honest working time. It feels like a very limited usage budget that disappears much faster than users expect. I am extremely dissatisfied with this. On top of that, when Codex starts, it reads AGENTS.md and possibly other system or instruction files, and from what I understand, this already consumes part of the limit. In my case, around 3% was gone before I even started doing any real task. If Codex does this on every launch or every new prompt/task, then the limits burn even faster. This means users lose part of their paid quota simply because Codex reads setup files and prepares context, not because actual work has been done. I consider this robbery. This should either be clearly explained in the interface, or these internal setup costs should not be counted against the user’s limit.