How to Make GPT-5.6 Usage Limits Last Longer
For most everyday engineering work in the GPT app, Medium or High offers the best balance between results and usage. xhigh should be saved for genuinely difficult problems.
Max reportedly uses nearly twice as many tokens as xhigh while producing only a small, hard-to-notice quality improvement. Ultra may look like a normal high-level reasoning option, but it starts a .
In the current setup, subagents run at maximum effort, can create more subagents, and copy the full main conversation by default, which may exhaust within minutes. GPT-5.6 also tends to do more work than requested, so prompts should state the exact scope and a clear stopping point rather than merely being shortened.
Key points
- Start with Medium or High for routine engineering tasks.
- Use xhigh only for complex work.
- Avoid Max when the small reported quality gain does not justify its much higher token use.
- Ultra can launch multiple subagents and consume very quickly.
- Tell GPT-5.6 exactly what to complete and where to stop.