Purely anecdotal, but when OpenAI removed Codex-5.3 from the ChatGPT sub and forced me to move to GPT-5.5, the result was far worse than what I was enjoying with Codex.
And, of course, it was burning 10 times more tokens for this output.
Yeah they are 100% in the wrong for removing the fine tuned codex models. It makes sense why they wouldn't want to allocate so many resources towards fine tuning but still the enshittification of GPT models is real
I have the opposite experience with codex 5.3 I had to use 5.2 to design and 5.3-codex to execute , while 5.4 was a better in both, and 5.5 ( all used xhigh) is even better