I think my next steps are: 1) try out openai $20/month. I've heard they're much more generous. 2) try out open router free models. I don't need geniuses, so long as I can see the thinking (something that Claude code obfuscates by default) I should be good. I've heard good things about the CLIO harness and want to try openrouter+clio
Word on the street is that Opus is much much larger of a model than GPT-5.4 and that’s why the rate limits on Codex are so much more generous. But I guess you could also just switch to Sonnet or Haiku in Claude Code?
Openrouter free models have 50 requests per day limit + data collection. As per their doc.
OpenAI has the better coding model anyways. You will be pleasantly surprised by Codex. The TUI tool is less buggy and runs faster and it's a more careful and less error-prone model. It's not as "creative" but it's more intelligent.
On top of that their $20 plan has much higher usage limits than Anthropic's $20 plan and they allow its use in e.g. opencode. So you can set up opencode to use both OpenAI's codex plan plus one of the more intelligent Chinese models so you can maximize your usage. Have it fully plan things out using GPT 5.4, write code using e.g. Qwen 3.6, then switch back to GPT 5.4 for review
i tried out gpt 5.4 xhigh and it did meaningfully worse with the same prompt as opus 4.6. like, obvious mistakes
I'm taking a bet on local models to do the non genius work. Gemma 4 (released yesterday) has been designed to run on laptops / edge devices....and so far is running pretty well for me.