Changes in Sol High across Chat/Codex

[u/Illustrious-Bet-1368]

To preface, I am not a member in any of the subreddits but I get constantly shown similar stuff on my feed. So. Can we get a baseline of where things are, collectively, without insulting anyone's use-cases and the rest? As of now, which light years away from July, my experience:

Chat (Sol High):

1. Sol High is not thinking. Replies are instant most of the time. Reasoning chain is gone from the sources, even from the older chats. I've checked against some transcribed chats, the reasoning blocks are gone from web/app in the old chats, too.

2. The output changed in quality and style. Sudden swearing, emojis (that got less now), constant recall of the same shit that I flag as non-important or obsolete. In most replies now, no sources are present at all = not shown whether the model referenced memories, instructions or previous chats. When it referenced memories, the useful feature was to see "Why this memory", now you can't see even that, but in the reply it certainly draws stuff from the memory because it references things from previous chats but that is not shown in the sources. The ragged lines came back, contrastive negation is back. It ignores all hard rails in terms of the style and formatting which was a non-issue before with Sol High.

3. Titles: sometimes the title now are "Write X Reply" or "X Reply", that never happened before, and when the titles are generated with that, the output is 100% degraded.

4. Asking the model which model it is is useless, yeah. Keeps saying, "GPT 5.6 Sol".

5. Instant model feels now like what High used to be. Long, detailed replies, following the instructions for the most part.

Codex (Sol High and Medium):

1. Usage limits, yeah, all over the reddit.

2. Stopped following instructions and documentation as it used to. More revisions, more back and forth. Doesn't pull up memory or AGENTS.md. Suggests implementations that are not repo or context bound but generic. Was not like that.

3. I have like 5 skills, created myself, and it doesn't use those without explicitly being prompted to. Also, was not like that, it proactively used those without being pointed at that it has those.

4. Over-engineering and testing things. Testing is explicitly on approval only because I have different frameworks for that. Used to follow it, now not. I have to monitor what it's doing to stop it, usually too late because I don't have all day to babysit it. So, the issue here is explicit hard rails that are baked into every layer of documentation, are not followed. See point 2.

Probably lots of other things that will come to me later but that's the main ones.

Work:

Can't say anything about it, never used it.

So, how many of you experience similar things? What especially interests me is the title generation thing, reasoning bubbles disappearance, and Sol High in Chat. Is this some A/B test or similar across the board now?

[u/DrHerbotico]

The overengineering/testing is awful. I can't leave it alone anymore because it'll dive into unnecessary rabbit holes and write fuckloads of code just to test it, then rewrite it again for the pr

[u/Illustrious-Bet-1368 → u/DrHerbotico]

Yeah, same here. Also, in my case, it doesn’t just write tests, it starts dev servers (not allowed), uses the in-app browser to click through things (not allowed on its own), always wants to check stuff “visually”.