I Am the Reason OpenAI Is Killing Unlimited Chats | Hacker News Reader

I Am the Reason OpenAI Is Killing Unlimited Chats

chaosmanage.github.io

> 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.

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.

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.

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)

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...

Wasn't there a study about childcare facilities where, after a fee was introduced, late pickups actually increased? Putting a specific price on things can actually make people behave worse than just "be reasonable, please."

We left a bucket out while we were out with the kids. No issue. Had too much at the end of the night, and had to tell the last stragglers to just take handfuls when we got back. Maybe that's a good, quick temperature check on whether your area is high-trust/low-trust.

How is this small neighbourhood morality applicable to a globally available Internet service? They're not giving out free candy, they're trying to make money and get more customers by offering unlimited chats. If unlimited chats stop being worth it for them, they remove them. At no point of the process I can see them at a board meeting crying about people not being nice.

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

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.

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".

"So, OpenAI, if you're reading this: I'm not sorry about that. Claude here i come."

Good riddance. Like geez.

He bragged about it only after it became impossible to do the same.

Trillion dollar company repeatedly does things in their own self interest at the expense of the rest of society. Individual does something in their own self-interest at the expense of trillion dollar company.

You're not wrong, but only in the sense that OpenAI and plenty of other powerful companies are full of people doing pretty much the same thing, and they cause a lot more "nice things" to disappear than individuals like the one you're talking about could ever cause to get taken away in their lifetime.

Reminds me of unlimited cloud storage, abused by people to store terabytes and even petabytes of data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14511935#14514308

User stores 2 petabytes of porn on Amazon Cloud: https://www.techspot.com/news/70741-redditor-tested-amazon-u...

Why does it matter whether it was porn? Would you be more sympathetic if those petabytes were filled with pictures of roses?

> unlimited cloud storage, abused by people to store terabytes and even petabytes of data

How is it abuse to use the feature as advertised? If they only wanted, say, 1 TB per user, then why not limit it to 1 TB per user? Only a vanishingly small number of people would even notice. The only difference is "unlimited cloud storage" doesn't sound as good in ads as "1 TB cloud storage". That's just marketing writing checks that engineering can't cash, that's nothing new.

You're way to harsh. The guy simply used what was available to him.

How is this different from using your €90 Anthropic subscription to the fullest and then discovering same usage via api would cost many thousands a month.

No doubt they are loosing great deal of money on it, but if they provide this service why should an average person not use it?

If a restaurant offers complementary breath mints in a bowl by the door, but you empty out the bowl and take all of them, you are in fact an asshole. It's not complicated.

But if they advertise all you can eat and you eat the entire buffet, it's fair game.

It's the advertising that makes it different.

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.

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.

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.

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

Even if so, next week will be different again.

Nah usage is def down since a few months ago (for both anthropic and openai)

I will be switching away from anthropic due to its relentless blocking. It outright refuses to do certain things such as log into an account with a TOPT despite that being perfectly acceptable

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.

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.

gork.

Everyone believes the grass is greener on the other side and that their use case won't be blocked (until it is)

I do all my coding as few-shot copilot tasks with shared context to save on claude. Same principle, actually more efficient.

Click bait titles are trending on HN now?

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.

> 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...

This might be better than nothing for those who truly dislike Claude Code’s interface or something, but it’s basically just OpenCode as a front end to the claude application. Arguably worse for those wanting to avoid Claude’s massive system prompt, and you lose concurrent tool calls and other features. Still cheaper than the API route, so it’s something.

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

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

@dang can we change the title? It’s clickbait

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> they are making a huge untenable mess.

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

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.

Even if you do this it'll often continue with the design that got "baked in". For example, say that you said you wanted private user views, and there was already a way to have views and a way to have permissions, but opus for whatever reason went and made a user-private-views table (side note: I mean brand new table, not a view!) on top because it's not a human being with opinions and it just needles on your prompt without taking a holistic view.

Then, your LLM code reviews will never call this out. You have to look at the code yourself and correct it. If you don't, this type of monkey patch engineering will proliferate and make your codebase so awful that your successor will become a homicidial maniac.

That said, you're correct that even the code reviews often need to be triple checked before they are worth anything.

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.

This also occurred to me but never tried it out.

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.

People hated that cyanydeez told them the truth.

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

In the US, that’s considered a feature.

If things can't be unlimited they shouldn't be advertised as unlimited.

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