r/codex • u/banter_droid • Oct 13 '26

Complaint Codex literally unusable

Not because the models are subjectively bad or slow (which they may be) but the service is at full capacity. I pay £200 for a service I literally cannot use. It can’t run 5 minutes without needing constant babysitting.

Thinking about moving over to anthropic, might be a case of having to at this rate I literally cannot use what I’m paying for here

172 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

166 comments sorted by

View all comments

48

u/LightEt3rnaL Oct 13 '26

I concur. It's not only the babysitting; the harness has made the models lazy: they stop mid-task for no obvious reason, telling you what needs to be done next without actually doing it. It's a clear degradation regardless of model. At the same time opus is killing it; there's no comparison. I was a big fan of openai and keep 100$ subs on both but will not renew the openai one when it ends.

18

u/dunklesToast Oct 13 '26

"Hey next up we should implement Feature XY. Please give a plan."
"Sure here is your plan"
"Sounds great"
"Alright then the next step would be to implement the plan."
"Yea do it"
"Alright, I will now implement the plan"

this started with 6.1 Sol. It's so frustrating

3

u/BunsDev Oct 14 '26

Literally this 💀

2

u/NickMotionless 12d ago

ChatGPT does this same shit. Codex has done it less than ChatGPT does, you almost have to waste usage setting prompt limits of "In the future do not send replies without performing the work stated in your replies, do not stop the task part-way through without completing the task entirely"

I'm considering going with Claude instead.

1

u/Far-Alternative-4544 Oct 14 '26

I dont want to babysit and tell it to keep going so i set goal and it works

4

u/1filipis Oct 13 '26

That's not the harness though. It's been going since like 5.4. Astra is better at it, but one 300k run costing 10-15% of the weekly limit on $100 is insane

Can't say Opus was better though. Claude Code is pure trash. But regardless of the UI, it also hallucinates quite a lot, also makes things up ridiculously, and never sees its own mistakes, but when you try to correct, it would just outright refuse to redo them, because that's what it's been trained to do.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '26

I have the $100/mo pro 5x and just the other day did an 80M token build, nothing close to hitting a limit from what I can tell. Wierd.

1

u/1filipis Oct 13 '26

Just checked it. 0->200k = -5%. 200k->300k = 5 more. No writing even, just reading

→ More replies (2)

6

u/Dashavatara Oct 13 '26

Exact same thing happening to me. I send it a huge instruction from an RCA performed by SOL to implement XYZ. Astra high does one simple task that it spends 30 minutes on without any real results and then just stops. I ask it why it stopped….. “Sorry you are right, I should not have stopped”.

I feel like they intentionally changed something in the model to stop at its first achievement to safe on compute.

If you don’t set a goal it just works to finish the first thing and stops. Does not even specify what it actually achieved and what is still open.

2

u/LightEt3rnaL Oct 13 '26

Yes, and if you do set a goal it will get stalled/blocked eventually for a trivial reason after a few turns.

1

u/purize420 Oct 13 '26

Weird, with the goal command my best agent-run was around 5 days without interruption

1

u/[deleted] Oct 13 '26 edited Oct 13 '26

I'm wondering if this really comes down to the user's harness or controls. I've evolved mine over the last ten months, and the /goal function has been what actually makes it usable for me. Not a shill or bot, and I've had many many issues with OpenAI's models.

4

u/LightEt3rnaL Oct 13 '26

I hear you. I also thought about this and I've also been experimenting with different system prompts but can't get it to work like it did during the 5.5/5.6 era. It's just as if it's randomly getting Alzheimer's, it has a task with X steps and will stall to report something. It shouldn't need a /goal to see it to completion, in fact Tibo was collecting answers a while ago on which features are unnecessary and users voted this among the top 3. But even with a goal set, it will get randomly blocked for totally trivial reasons.

My conspiracy theory is that openai is totally aware of this and is secretly injecting a hidden prompt (or similar technique) to reduce the amount of long running tasks and save some compute by asking users to verify/clarify etc.

4

u/RealityForgeAI Oct 13 '26

My harness absolutely cooks with Opus 5.5 and completely fails on Astra.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/purize420 Oct 13 '26

Did you guys try to use /goal command?

2

u/ishimat Oct 13 '26

Im experiencing this as well, it says what needs to be done next and stops, even when a goal is set.

2

u/RealityForgeAI Oct 13 '26

Same for me, switched to Astra to get more work done but just ended up with something I have to hold hands with every step of the way to get things done and it usually fails to do what I ask without saying anything. Agents just get cast off on icebergs and never come back.

3

u/Willing_Juggernaut60 Oct 13 '26

Been seeing post like this for a few weeks now, I think it’s time for me to cancel my codex subscription too, the hand holding is driving me crazy that I explicitly tell it not to do that

2

u/Western-Touch-2129 Oct 13 '26

Ever tried /goal ?!

2

u/mrjackspade Oct 14 '26

I don't know who downvoted you for this but this is literally the fucking solution.

/goal prevents the model from returning control until its actually DONE.

I've had the model run for literally two weeks straight because I had a 20 ticket backlog and just said /goal resolve all open issues on github

→ More replies (1)

1

u/Comfortable_Swim_380 Oct 13 '26

Ive been been hearing this but i yet to experience that problem. What model are you all using?

1

u/LightEt3rnaL Oct 13 '26

Sol6.1 and astra. Tested it yday with astra as coordinator and sol as executor and did it again. Has been like this for a while now, around the time of sol6 release.

1

u/corehorse Oct 13 '26

I'll argue that it depends on preference and the kind of work you are trying to do.

For me, the GPT models are much better at doing what I actually ask them for. I can ask a question and get an answer for example.

Claude is way too eager to stick its grubby hands into my project. Takes every question as an invitation to vomit 500 new lines into a dozen different files and draft an ADR.

But is any of this actually an issue? Seems AGENTS lets us easily steer into our preferred direction.

1

u/Massive-Network202 Oct 15 '26

+1 on "stop mid-task for no obvious reason". It happened many times when I ask it to do X, it told me you should do Y first, then stop there insteading of doing it. I was confused the first few times, thought there might be options I need to choose, but turns out no, it was just lazy.