I Am the Reason OpenAI Is Killing Unlimited Chats

Posted by gulmothrowaway 18 hours ago

Comments

Comment by thorncorona 5 hours ago

> To be clear, I am not breaking any rules.

> I am simply making the best use of what OpenAI has made available to me

People like this are why you can't have good things.

Comment by ALLTaken 42 minutes ago

Isn't it toxic to brag about it online like he does? It wasn't a feature many were even aware of, but instead of placing it as responsible disclosure, he places it as: "I ruined it for all of you, but I had a lot of fun doing it".

Comment by jasongi 49 minutes ago

OpenAI played stupid games, won stupid prizes. They have designed a subscription where the optimal behaviour is to spend down limits as soon as possible, because if you don't their random resets, which make up almost half the value of subscriptions sometimes, will be wasted.

But to do THAT you need to max out every 5 hour block. Of course people are going to start abusing unlimited chat in the mean time and start optimising the ability to burn tokens as fast as they can.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by antonvs 2 hours ago

It would be easy enough for OpenAI to block this kind of use, both in their TOS and technically. It seems like there would be plenty of other reasons not to support unlimited chats long term.

Comment by TheChaplain 1 hour ago

I believe his point it, that exploitative- and abusive behaviour as well as "inventive interpretations" of agreements by the few, ends up punishing the majority.

It should not be necessary to set up technical or written guards against every possible act of bad behaviour.

Instead be nice. Don't be that **ole who steals the whole candy bucket on Halloween just because you can.

Comment by glimshe 58 minutes ago

You know, that's an interesting analogy.

I think the core issue isn't the abuse, but the very existence of a service that claims to provide infinite of something. Infinite is always BS because resources aren't infinite.

It's just like "all you can eat" places kicking out people after they've been in the restaurant for a while. We should discourage these marketing tricks because they are always a lie.

Regarding Halloween, we stopped leaving unattended buckets out because of bad actors taking everything. Now we hand out the candy ourselves. Our home no longer provides "all you can grab" treats...

Comment by xtajv 58 minutes ago

HN username xtajv's law:

> Do not attribute to malice that which can be attributed to really weird usecases.

see also, xkcd.com/1172 (spacebar heating)

Comment by no-name-here 1 hour ago

True, but OAI’s new solution has the following advantages:

* Lets people use whatever approach they prefer (- and if someone wants to keep their existing setup they can - with reasonable limits)

* Minimizes risk of users getting banned, including due to A) activity they didn’t know was disallowed, or B) false positives from OAI

* Heads off different future loopholes

* Avoids adding more TOS complexity

* Avoids users being uncertain if borderline activities will get them banned

Comment by suyash 3 minutes ago

Click bait titles are trending on HN now?

Comment by ronsor 12 hours ago

I understand preferring Claude models in the abstract, but as a product? The random restrictions have significantly reduced their usability.

We had 2 major threads in the past 48 hours complaining about this:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319358 (AI/ML work with large models)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50320255 (reverse engineering)

The threads are full of upset comments!

The only non-OAI options are open models and I guess Gemini 4 now.

Comment by somehnguy 10 hours ago

I decided on my OAI subscription when comparing mainly due to reports like those. GPT-Sol has been happily assisting me in reverse engineering efforts without any issues. I very strongly dislike an AI model or company deciding what my morals are for me.

Comment by qwerpy 7 hours ago

Claude is still working for me on a mashup of two very mainstream games. It has had to do (and continues to) extensive reverse engineering and quite a bit of "hmm the game assets are encrypted, let me decompile it and find the decryption key". Not sure if it just refuses new projects or I got lucky and managed to avoid all the tripwires so far. I don't plan on sticking around to have it suddenly start refusing to work for me, so I'll also be switching to OpenAI once my month ends. Hopefully it keeps working for the rest of my remaining time!

Jokes on me if Codex refuses right out of the box, so I'll start low on the usage tiers and slowly upgrade as it proves it can be trusted to continue the work.

Comment by glimshe 48 minutes ago

It looks like they wanted to kill most of the reverse engineering by cutting down on low effort recomps. It had got to the point where people who knew nothing of coding were recompiling major games just by throwing tokens at it. I'm neither condemning nor supporting it, just reporting.

Someone on Reddit made a good point. Even a short fence stops most people from treading on your lawn.

In other words, people who try to divide and conquer recompilations will likely still succeed... for now.

Comment by aleqs 9 hours ago

I've only started hitting the anthropic blocks in the last week or so, I get much more blocks from openai/codex. This plus the recent reductions in usage allowance on both are finally pushing me to look elsewhere. I've had the highest level x20 subs for both since they came out, but I'm getting 5x the value/price from DeepSeek at this point.

Comment by _aavaa_ 8 hours ago

I believe OpenAI went back on the reduction in the $200 plan, and actually double usage for the 20, 100, and 500.

Comment by rapist 5 hours ago

gork.

Comment by jasongi 55 minutes ago

While I'm sure OpenAI won't miss OPs business, the "Claude here I come" is pretty indicative of the value in subs at the moment.

Claude seems to have higher limits by default instead of playing the random reset games.

In a world where subscription value isn't obfuscated by unlimited chat, the choice for a power user is obvious, especially since it took a month after Sonnet 5.5 for OpenAI to get Terra 6.1 out, using Sol for everything just ate through the limits.

Comment by jurgenburgen 3 hours ago

Probably not. It’s more likely it’s due to OpenAI having some problems raising funds which forces them to be more efficient with their capital: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50312922

Comment by xtajv 58 minutes ago

don't tell me somebody told them about the electricity bill

Comment by skybrian 8 hours ago

But if you get a Claude subscription, don't you have to use Claude Code? Why not pay the $20/month for OpenAI and use your favorite coding agent?

I've been doing that and it seems like quite a deal.

Comment by altbdoor 31 minutes ago

> But if you get a Claude subscription, don't you have to use Claude Code?

Seems like the doors are (slightly?) open right now. OpenCode just announced that users can use their Claude subscription:

- https://x.com/opencode/status/2116198602523513081

- https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/58782#issuecommen...

Comment by bob1029 4 hours ago

> Since ChatGPT chats cannot spawn or control subchats/subganets so I had to be a bit creative in order to do multi-agent development and orchestration.

Multi-agent is mostly dead. One big agent loop running GPT6.1 absolutely dominates any weird ideas like this now. I still use sub agents for some tasks where I want to compress the action space and context. For example, testing a workflow that requires 100+ tool interactions for each logical test. Without a subagent it's really hard to guarantee a test makes it E2E. I have some very "persuasive" methods for long horizon tests that would break the main loop's dynamics.

We may not feel so compelled to exploit the system if we could figure out how to not be so wasteful. Multi agent schemes can bloat token usage by orders of magnitude. They force us to consider consuming less ideal tokens from contexts and vendors with higher variance.

HN loses its marbles when I suggest it's economically feasible to prepay for API tokens and use these as the exclusive means of performing AI work. I get done with a thousand tokens what my peers cannot do with a million. It doesn't matter how many hammers or workers you have if you don't have the aesthetic preferences and domain expertise to employ them correctly.

Comment by argee 2 hours ago

For me Opus 5.5 will frequently make several thousand LoC where 10 would suffice. One time I got fed up and told it to repro the "bugs" it was solving for with puppeteer, and lo and behold, it could not do it overnight. Hard to believe that people let this run wild on their codebase, if they do, they are making a huge untenable mess.

Comment by akazantsev 9 minutes ago

This matches with my experience as well, especially with pull request reviews. Stock command gives me 10 "issues" and once you start asking to fix them, it will gladly tell you this is not the issue. I use the following prompt now and it significantly reduces the amount of noise.

/code-review <PR#>

versus

Review the changes in <branch> against <base>. Verify your finding and offer the fixes if the finding are valid.

Comment by Jyaif 2 hours ago

> they are making a huge untenable mess.

I agree. It's possible future AIs will be able to salvage those code bases though.

Comment by zihotki 1 hour ago

That's a big bold claim. Multi-agents are still very useful for tokenOps and context management. You don't need sol to investigate codebase or the datasets, terra or luna would do it cheaper. Clear context for certain tasks also still matters.

Comment by chicagobuss 4 hours ago

> Multi-agent is mostly dead

Wow that's a huge take. Seems like you're on your own with this one.. everyone I know is scaling up the number of agents they're able to keep fed with good, useful work.

Comment by donatj 3 hours ago

Everyone I know doing things like this has actual abysmal work output. They spend all their time playing with their toys and no time actually producing useful output.

Comment by searealist 3 hours ago

OpenAI's view of multi-agent is something like: you get the same work faster, but it does not scale linearly.

Only you can decide if that speed is worth the cost.

Comment by cyanydeez 9 hours ago

Anyone building products on cloud models is building in a swamp, a sand trap, a flood zone.

Anyone whose buainess wont be competitivw without a cloud model is going to lose their business.

Any government letting cloud models consume its private infrastructure is yielding its authority to private intetests.

Comment by antonvs 2 hours ago

> Any government letting cloud models consume its private infrastructure is yielding its authority to private intetests.