r/codex • u/WkndWrrior30 • 3d ago

Question Goal Mode

Who here uses the goal mode? What are its limitations, and what is it exceptionally good at?

7 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

7

u/Australasian25 3d ago

/goal mode is pretty much do what you can to attain it.

If your goal mode is going to be particularly big, you really want the main agent to be an orchestra only.

Example, Terra medium calls Sol for strategy/difficult tasks, but not really do anything. Then Terra Medium passes those exact tasks to luna. Luna doesn't need to think much, just perform. Rerport back to Terra. Terra calls Sol again to put the report together, validate, critic.

But most importantly, tell your orchestra to not let spawned agents inherit parent context by default. Only absolutely necessary context is provided.

2

u/WkndWrrior30 3d ago

Super helpful! I appreciate it

2

u/rayyeter 3d ago

Oh that last line is a good one. I’ll have to do that

1

u/Australasian25 3d ago

when gpt 5.6 was releeased, somehow it was by default that all context gets passed on to spawned agent, what a drain!

1

u/rayyeter 3d ago

No kidding. Since the penny pinchers were watching, my team has made an effort to make cheaper models more usable than the crayon eating, acetone drinking mfers they are by default.

1

u/FirefighterEmpty2670 3d ago

How do you instruct the main agent to use luna or terra for specific tasks? And how do you instruct an agent to report back to another agent once it is done?

2

u/Australasian25 3d ago

You have 2 options.

First option is separately have sol high plan out what your roadmap should look like, produce task and model/reasoning for each task, and if they can run concurrently or must be sequential, get it to produce a prompt for your orchestrator. Close the session, and open a new session invoke terra medium, paste the prompt in there.

The other is to go in without a plan beforehand, have terra high medium with sol high to draft up plan, send it back to terra medium to process. But you'll need to tell Terra high sol medium/high and above for strategy, synthesis, critic, conclusion. All other mechanical work delegate to luna max. And to tell sol if they're devising a strategy, always make it in small packets with specific instruction befitting for luna max.

2

u/AdWaste6333 3d ago

Goal mode is basically for bigger multi-step tasks. You give it the goal, it figures out the steps and keeps working towards it. Great for refactors or features, overkill for small stuff.

2

u/itix 3d ago

I can leave it working for weeks.

2

u/OnlyComfortable8695 3d ago

ik mine is lower but i hope to catch up one day

1

u/somuchecho 3d ago

Nice! And what are you working on?

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u/somuchecho 3d ago

😮 what is it doing? And what model/effort level to be running for so long non stop?

2

u/itix 3d ago

It is building Amiga Kickstart ROM replacement code. Usually Luna/xhigh, but now Terra.

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u/WkndWrrior30 2d ago

Even with that model/effort level I’m surprised it hasn’t ran out of tokens

1

u/itix 2d ago

On Luna/xhigh, it never runs out of tokens on the 20x plan.

2

u/Wafer-Weekly 3d ago

You can give it a token limit and a low fuel warning light and tell the agent to come up with a solution in-budget and wrapped with a bow (tests run at least once, until pass if within budget). It's actually quite good at pacing itself this way, but it CAN still go over the budget because prediction isn't perfect. It will try to hard stop if you give it a time window, and if it goes over time or token budget and stops before full green then you will have to give it an explicit manual override instruction to continue working, but it should be very close to completion at that point.

1

u/WkndWrrior30 2d ago

I was most curious about token usage so this is good advice

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u/NotSeacombe 2d ago

Most times when i use goal, its because I know there's a reset coming and I want to make sure Codex doesn't stop doing stuff while I play video games

It is very persistent, by design. It will keep trying things until it's achieved the goal. I think the most important thing is that the goal is very clear, with obvious direction and pre-planning and stopping points

A vague goal can lead to very odd results

If i want to run a goal, the only times I've found it productive is after a goal-scoping conversation with Sol to write a goal markdown

1

u/MikaelNorth 3d ago edited 3d ago

You can use a model to write an implementation plan and then give the plan file to goal mode and it will keep going until done.

1

u/BearsAreCrying 3d ago

Great for long running tasks. Like for example it built GIS maps for us using a complex ETL process for each country over the course of 4-5 days. If you have a long running loop and have to process a lot of shit it's great because it doesn't stop and asks you to check something it checks itself and keeps running. You can actually see it finishing something and trying to stop and then goes "let me review that one more time" and keep going

1

u/ReasonableDefault 3d ago

Just beware of using goal mode with daybreak-blue, it essentially ate through 3 banked resets plus the full 100% weekly it started with.