daily-held: review diversity during Codex outage — renewed to Sep 5

Held item (route 3 — needs-human)

Auto-filed by /daily 2026-07-16 as a TRACKED needs-human task (route 3 of the three-route classifier).

• What happened: the Codex org quota is exhausted until ~2026-08-06 (CODEX_QUOTA_LIVE sentinel) — every doubled review site ran single-Claude across the entire fleet on 2026-07-16 and will for ~3 more weeks
• Which carve-out held it: spends money / genuinely ambiguous — reviewer-capacity decision with a bill either way
• Decision needed: decide: accept single-Claude review for the window, or wire a temporary alternate cross-vendor reviewer (e.g. a different OpenAI key/org or another vendor) — spends money either way
• Suggested surface: PM Needs you block.

Analysis & recommendation (2026-07-17, autonomous legwork per PM directive)

Root cause is most likely a LAPSED ChatGPT Pro subscription, not exhausted Pro quota.

Evidence:

• Quota sentinel live: exhausted until 2026-08-06T13:26Z (detected 2026-07-08; .claude/cache/codex-quota-exhausted-until).
• The stored refusal text upsells "start a free trial of Plus" — messaging OpenAI shows to accounts WITHOUT an active paid plan.
• ~/.codex/auth.json OAuth id-token claims: chatgpt_plan_type: pro, but chatgpt_subscription_active_until = 2026-05-24T19:06:55Z (subscription last verified by OpenAI 2026-05-01; token last refreshed 2026-07-04). The claims say the Pro window ended May 24.
• Codex CLI auth mode is chatgpt (subscription OAuth). The .env OPENAI_API_KEY is dead — HTTP 401 on a free GET /v1/models probe — so metered API-key billing is not currently possible without minting + funding a new key.
• Pre-outage fleet volume: ~130–420 Codex dispatches/day (Jul 1–7: mean ~286/day; 1,969 CLI sessions, ~1.16 GB rollouts).
• Value of the twin (why this matters): Jul 1–7, 203 reconciler adjudications across 742 posted Codex verdicts → ~27% of doubled rounds ended in a genuine cross-family disagreement. The Codex twin is not a rubber stamp; single-Claude review is a measurable oversight downgrade.

Recommendation (in order):

1. Check + renew the ChatGPT Pro subscription (chatgpt.com → Settings → Subscription, on the account backing ~/.codex/auth.json). If it lapsed on 2026-05-24 as the token claims indicate, renewing (~$200/mo) most likely restores Codex immediately — no repo changes needed (the CLI reuses the existing OAuth). ~5 minutes, known price, restores cross-family review ~3 weeks early.
2. If the subscription turns out to be active (stale claims) → the quota is genuinely exhausted: either buy in-plan Codex usage credits if the account page offers them, or accept single-Claude until Aug 6 ($0 — the #1204 pre-spawn skip + the no-show fallback already make the outage zero-waste operationally).
3. Not recommended: switching the Codex CLI to metered API-key billing at fleet volume — rough estimate $60–200/day (~$1–4K to Aug 6), and it needs a fresh funded key anyway.

Independent hygiene flag (applies under any option): the .env OPENAI_API_KEY is invalid (401) — re-mint at leisure; anything else referencing it fails the same way.

After restoring: rm .claude/cache/codex-quota-exhausted-until to force a probe dispatch (#1126) — on success the fleet resumes doubled review automatically.

Consolidation: #1140 ("Codex quota out to Aug 6 - pay or ride it out", filed 2026-07-08) was the same decision — archived as duplicate, analysis lives here.

Update 2026-08-09 — outage renewed to Sep 5; still relevant

Re-checked in the user-directed blocked-task relevance sweep:

• The outage did NOT end on 2026-08-06. A fresh quota-exhausted sentinel was detected 2026-08-06T14:30Z with reset 2026-09-05T13:38Z (.claude/cache/codex-quota-exhausted-until, parse_ok: true) — every doubled review site runs single-Claude for ~4 more weeks.
• The stored refusal text still upsells "start a free trial of Plus", so the 2026-07-17 diagnosis above (lapsed ChatGPT Pro subscription; token claims say the Pro window ended 2026-05-24) still stands.
• Recommendation unchanged: check/renew the ChatGPT Pro subscription on the account backing ~/.codex/auth.json (recommendation 1 above). The #1204 pre-spawn skip keeps the outage zero-waste operationally in the meantime.