Codex on the ChatGPT Free plan: we gave it $0 and the same booking app

We handed the free tier of OpenAI's coding agent the exact founder pitch, curveballs and frozen gates that Cursor Pro and Claude Code faced in August. It cleared all twelve, including the concurrency gate both $20 tools failed, in under ten minutes of agent time. The bill was 37 percent of a 30-day meter, and the model behind the door was not the one in the launch posts.