Codex on AWS bedrock bug causing 10x charges

8/21/2026 at 4:28:55 AM

Wow, that whole thread is borderline incoherent, presumably generated by an AI without adequate oversight.

Here are the docs:

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/prompt-caching...

The thread has little explanation as to what weird thing they’re doing to Codex that is making the default work poorly, and it kind of seems like it’s getting confused about whether it wants to set the caching mode or the breakpoint or both.

In any case, I find the behavior change interesting. It sounds to be like 5.5 and below may have been using a conventional attention scheme where a cached KV sequence can be easily used to restore a prefix of itself, but perhaps 5.6 is using linear attention or LSTM or another recurrent scheme where you cannot rewind the model state by just truncating it.

by amluto

8/21/2026 at 6:27:27 AM

I have noticed the same thing starting with 5.6 when editing my last prompt inside the vscode codex plugin, I’ve seen the model’s thinking respond to the edit with a remark.

Slightly bummed out about it because in the past you could try different situations during a planning session and it wouldn’t pollute the cache but now it does. I’m not sure if forking the conversation has the same problem.

by fakwandi_priv

8/21/2026 at 4:36:17 AM

It’s really cool that we have this proof that US companies are half year behind Chinese models in architecture.

by xiphias2

8/21/2026 at 7:56:06 AM

Then why are they (US frontier models) still so far ahead whenever I test them against the latest Chinese models? No bias here, I'd love them to be better for my own personal gain, but I haven't seen it

by weird-eye-issue

8/21/2026 at 9:06:30 AM

Behind on architecture, ahead on training? It seemed pretty obvious to me that the opus 4.7 and 4.8 releases were more about trying to retain 4.6-level capabilities while being cheaper to run, which would fit. And they can burn so much money on training.

by regularfry

8/21/2026 at 9:10:18 AM

I don't know I just care about the end result. And yeah what you're mentioning here is a pretty common conspiracy theory but you don't actually have any insight into that do you?

by weird-eye-issue

8/21/2026 at 12:16:08 PM

Apologies, you asked a question. I assumed that meant you were interested.

by regularfry

8/21/2026 at 12:35:04 PM

You didn't answer my question you literally just asked me another question and then parroted a common talking point about Opus models (which isn't even frontier - Fable is)

by weird-eye-issue

8/21/2026 at 9:59:36 AM

There is so much misinformation in the ecosystem, parrots just hitting "Reply" without thinking one iota, you really cannot trust "human" opinions on the internet anymore, anywhere.

Same with local LLMs, I'd love to use them for my day-to-day software engineering, and I'm not exactly GPU poor, then people with 12GB VRAM try to convince me their local setup is perfectly fine running latest Qwen and it does real engineering but whenever I try, they're a far cry from what Codex+GPT 5.x would do.

Only way to be sure is creating your own private benchmarks and use those, and the difference in quality becomes very apparent, very quickly, for your specific use cases.

by embedding-shape

8/21/2026 at 5:57:37 AM

What is the proof?

by geysersam

8/21/2026 at 6:24:13 AM

Nemotron was using hybrid with recurrence via mamba layers since around April 2025.

by cma

8/21/2026 at 7:10:16 AM

[dead]

by firecall

8/21/2026 at 4:46:15 AM

> It sounds to be like 5.5 and below may have been using a conventional attention scheme where a cached KV sequence can be easily used to restore a prefix of itself, but perhaps 5.6 is using linear attention or LSTM or another recurrent scheme where you cannot rewind the model state by just truncating it.

I feel like this is the kind of substantial change to your product that you would need to tell your customers about. It would be simply disrespectful to your customers to not disclose this upfront.

by DrJokepu

8/21/2026 at 5:05:12 AM

It depends on who they consider the customers. Shareholders and govt are the customers, not users.

Users is the product.

by zx8080

8/21/2026 at 8:06:40 AM

“Users are the product” is a phrase used when the users aren’t the ones paying for a free service. For a paid API the users absolutely are the customers.

by thatguymike

8/21/2026 at 9:55:50 AM

> Wow, that whole thread is borderline incoherent, presumably generated by an AI without adequate oversight.

What sucks is that every issue tracker for these agent harnesses are the same, and this shit hides real issues!

For example, Codex started encrypting messages from a agent to the sub-agents when you use Sol + Ultra, which is terrible for debugging for obvious reasons. This GitHub issue exists for this: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/28058

Fine, the opening issue isn't concise exactly, but it's mostly clear what's going on. After a few messages, someone who uses LLMs without reviewing their output starts participating in the discussion, pastes huge walls of texts completely missing the point and overall just bloating the conversation so now whenever a maintainer actually want to address it, they have to wade through 20+ messages of just pure shit and bloat, to even understand what's going on.

Kind of wish some projects started having forums specifically for people who pay for forum access, or some other gate to get rid of these LLM lowlifers who cannot compose a simple message to explain what's in their head, and instead have to ruin perfectly fine conversations/discussions with their verbal poop.

by embedding-shape

8/21/2026 at 4:43:48 AM

i dont know what the hell is going on lately i pop in to issues or discussions and its agents talking to each other or telling me what PR to merge

I mean i use AI too but was taken back when an agent popped up dictating what i should do and so on....felt weird

by zuzululu

8/21/2026 at 6:23:25 AM

My most awkward experience was a maintainer commenting on my feature request just to prompt a bot to "explain to issue reporter why this is very hard to implement."

It felt like they were trying to avoid me. They could have simply addressed me and given me the explanation they gave to the bot: it would have been simpler for him and more polite. I did in fact reply without waiting for the bot.

by debugnik

8/21/2026 at 6:40:45 AM

It's as though you're talking to someone and they were said to their 'assistant', "Explain this to this person" and walked away. It doesn't really matter what the explanation is, it's just gross.

by squigz

8/21/2026 at 5:58:13 AM

The fact that companies with access to SOTA non-public AI keep having these kinds of dumb bugs in something as simple as a chat app helps validate my disbelief of people claiming AI is ready to replace all software development.

by ryanjshaw

8/21/2026 at 7:22:44 AM

> The fact that companies with access to SOTA non-public AI keep having these kinds of dumb bugs in something as simple as a chat app helps validate my disbelief of people claiming AI is ready to replace all software development.

Except leadership doesn't care about dumb bugs. Never has, never will (until it's too late). It cares about velocity and cost.

They'd totally replace all software development with worse AI software development in a heartbeat.

by palmotea

8/21/2026 at 7:35:58 AM

> Except leadership doesn't care about dumb bugs. Never has, never will (until it's too late). It cares about velocity and cost.

This is the very moment at which I started my own business. I prefer to work for myself with some quality standards than to be in a rush in front of a prompt (not that I do not use AI at all, I do, but not for generating code most of the time).

I knew the future, at that time was basically: pressure for speed, taking ownership of course, even if they rush you. Wild-guess, probably with an AI, to add on top more trch debt. Make everything unmaintainable in the long term.

So this was the perfect moment to show that things can be done in another way and quality can be kept higher than the competition bc what I am seeing lately is people throwing things in a rush. Better twopieces of well-crafted software than 10 pieces of unmantainable junk.

by germandiago

8/21/2026 at 1:29:42 PM

I think being self-employed is the only way you can make sure that your work is allowed to reach your own minimal quality standards.

by apercu

8/21/2026 at 9:35:52 AM

Precisely. I think everyone has been affected by the fearmongering and gaslighting to some dfgree. But step back and try and see whether software's getting better as a whole or going into reverse? OpenAI has basically unlimited internal compute and talent yet they screw this up amongst many other things. Shouldn't it be a 5 minute job for someone at AI to spin up a team of agents annd make sure this sort of thing never happens?

At a high level, most uses of AI I've seen seem to be people building other AI tools, orchestrators, managers, agent managers etc. But these are all means to ends. I mean I guess it's nice to play aroud with harnesses and command agents to do this and that, but where are the tangible outputs?

I just see so many people boasting of their token burn and the complexity of their agentic setup, yet they rarely show the actual outputs

by i2km

8/21/2026 at 11:23:58 AM

we've had bugs for decades; the people wanting to replace humans arn't going to care much.

by cyanydeez

8/21/2026 at 6:01:48 AM

AI is ready to replace both jobs and companies.

The companies you see struggling are ripe for disruption.

by echelon

8/21/2026 at 6:17:28 AM

So OpenAI the company making the AI and using it inhouse is ripe for disruption? What?

by remoroid

8/21/2026 at 6:42:34 AM

I want some of what he’s having please

by dozerly

8/21/2026 at 8:44:38 AM

[dead]

by ath3nd

8/21/2026 at 8:43:34 AM

[dead]

by ath3nd

8/21/2026 at 3:17:43 AM

Our codex on AWS Bedrock read / write cache ratio was less than 5%. Cache writes are very expensive and they were never being used. This results in codex on Bedrock causing ~10x what it should due to no caching and massive writes.

The workaround in issue resolved for me: web_search = "disabled"

by TheP1000

8/21/2026 at 4:11:21 AM

If you’ve got a workaround, I’d suggest updating the issue description to have it up top there so similarly impacted users can spot it quickly and benefit.

by otterley

8/21/2026 at 4:56:32 AM

It's already mentioned in the issue...

by the_duke

8/21/2026 at 5:36:01 AM

It’s in a comment halfway down the page. It’s not in the issue description.

If enough comments are added to the discussion, it might end up being collapsed.

by otterley

8/21/2026 at 4:58:52 AM

"causing" -> "costing", right?

by chrisweekly

8/21/2026 at 8:55:07 AM

In this case yeah. If it’s not reading the cache then it has to compute all the context window again and not just the newest tokens.

by vorticalbox

8/21/2026 at 4:39:35 AM

Way to bury the lede..

by yablak

8/21/2026 at 11:50:42 AM

I love the fact that devs are still complaining that invoices are able to grow from $300 to $1000+

How can anyone use a platform where this is even an issue? Just because AWS is a failure in this regard, doesn't mean there aren't alternatives with fixed prices or others with easily settable limits.

by GuestFAUniverse

8/21/2026 at 7:36:08 AM

Codex usage feels exorbitantly high since today. They [0] are denying it, but the number of anecdotal users who decided to raise this as an issue (as a result it's trending on X) says otherwise.

[0] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2090675027670978569

by prtmnth

8/21/2026 at 4:41:12 AM

Something is wrong with the codex app too, burning usage like crazy lately.

by spacedoutman

8/21/2026 at 4:48:07 AM

There haven't been any free resets in the past week, there were 4 in the first half of the month

by ac29

8/21/2026 at 6:31:24 AM

Yeah regardless of comments by the team to the contrary (https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2090675027670978569) I have observed this in the cdoex app.

My conspiratorial mind thinks they're doing this deliberately and using the resets to mask things so people can't tell their limits are reduced. The $200 / month plan covers about 2 days of usage for me right now.

by CSMastermind

8/21/2026 at 4:44:27 AM

indeed it has anybody know whats going on at openai ??

by zuzululu

8/21/2026 at 5:30:55 AM

Maybe preparing for their IPO?

by dgellow

8/21/2026 at 8:30:33 AM

Prompt edits leaking into the cache and affecting model responses is exactly the kind of billing-relevant behavior change that should be in release notes, not discovered by users.

by ike_sh

8/21/2026 at 10:46:24 AM

It would be ironic if this bug exists because it was vibe coded.

by cmiles8

8/21/2026 at 6:52:43 AM

Sounds like a path to profitability rather than a bug.

by bigbuppo

8/21/2026 at 7:33:02 AM

Bug for user = feature for company

by rochak

8/21/2026 at 7:30:47 AM

Bug ... Feature

by blitzar

8/21/2026 at 12:44:21 PM

You know, installing unsloth studio lets you use codex against a local qwen 3.8 instance, which does ~10 tok/sec without GPU on a modern machine, and 100+ tok/sec on a 5090, and is incredibly good.

by spwa4

8/21/2026 at 4:38:27 AM

I wonder if it's related to Codex wearing out SSDs.

by hk1337

8/21/2026 at 6:16:55 AM

[dead]

by vee-kay

8/21/2026 at 7:27:34 AM

Rookie mistake - it seems like they didn't follow manufacturers' guidance when installing the 10x engineers. One needs to clearly define which metric should be 10x'd before powering them up.

by bflesch

8/21/2026 at 4:08:27 AM

Loaded question: would an openrouter or similar solution caught this before the $BigProblem showed up?

by edoceo

8/21/2026 at 9:42:43 AM

But but according to Mr Altman, we've like entered the singularity. Right? Who cares about a billing issue?

by i2km

8/21/2026 at 10:22:44 AM

It’s called the singularity because all your money vanishes into a black hole.

by cedws

8/21/2026 at 9:09:16 AM

[flagged]

by ushiro35

8/21/2026 at 7:55:21 AM

[flagged]

by shidesheng

8/21/2026 at 5:18:52 AM

[dead]

by hahuhs

8/21/2026 at 6:50:47 AM

[dead]

by luciana1u

8/21/2026 at 5:47:19 AM

Funny how it is always more charges but never less or no charges.

"Random" accidents that always go against you, too biased to be random.

But don't notice that too much, you might start to see patterns here and there that you're not allowed to, might get you banned from places, etc.

by moralestapia

8/21/2026 at 2:00:36 PM

> Funny how it is always more charges but never less or no charges.

Recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337602

Quota resets are so frequent they don't make the news anymore.

by Supermancho

8/21/2026 at 7:22:02 AM

Applying Occam’s razor, which do you think is more likely:

1. OpenAI intentionally adds random overcharges. 2. OpenAI deprioritizes fixing actual bugs that cause occasional overcharges because doing so won’t affect their bottom line.

by catlifeonmars

8/21/2026 at 6:23:07 AM

This can be a reporting bias. Noone opens an issue when they were billed too low.

by varjag

8/21/2026 at 6:50:50 AM

I doubt anyone announces when they have under billed. OpenAI has also done many low price deals and quota resets.

by andrewchambers

8/21/2026 at 8:46:43 AM

Usually it's user's incentive to control over-billing and company's one to make sure there's no under-billing :)

by evalystai