Codex Desktop: Enabling Memories causes disproportionate quota usage #18699

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.416.11627

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Plus

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.2.0 arm64 arm

What issue are you seeing?

When "Enable Memories" is turned on in Personalization settings in Codex Desktop on macOS, quota usage becomes disproportionately high even for very small tasks.

I observed this while asking Codex to generate a commit message for a diff of only ~155 lines. That single session ended up consuming roughly 50% of my 5-hour quota. In one concrete step, it consumed about 3% of the 5-hour limit and 2% of the weekly limit just for commit message generation.

This seems far too high for such a lightweight task.

Important comparison:

• With Memories ON: quota drains extremely quickly
• With Memories OFF: usage appears much more normal

This suggests the Memories feature may be triggering excessive hidden background work, repeated memory retrieval/writes, or incorrect usage accounting.

Session ID from in-app feedback:
019dab9b-3111-7332-8b84-e5957d1e018e

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Open Codex Desktop on macOS.
2. Go to Personalization settings and enable "Enable Memories".
3. Open a repository with a relatively small staged or unstaged diff (in my case, about 155 lines).
4. Ask Codex to generate a commit message only.
5. Observe quota usage after the request.

Observed result

For a very small task, quota usage increases much more than expected.

In my case:

• The session ID was: 019dab9b-3111-7332-8b84-e5957d1e018e
• A commit-message-only request for a ~155-line diff consumed about 3% of the 5-hour limit and 2% of the weekly limit
• This session eventually consumed roughly 50% of my 5-hour quota
• The behavior was much less severe when "Enable Memories" was turned off

Notes

I do not have precise token-limit usage or context-window usage numbers from the UI for this session, but the visible quota drop was far larger than expected for the size of the task.

What is the expected behavior?

No response

Additional information

Comparison with another account

I tested Codex Desktop with a different account and turned Memories off there. In that setup, quota usage returned to what felt like normal behavior.

This makes the issue appear specifically related to having Memories enabled, rather than being caused only by the repository, the task itself, or the Desktop app in general.