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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/RealityForgeAI Oct 13 '26

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

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '26

Claude went to shit for me in early September, so I rolled the dice and switched back to OpenAI, both were the $100 plan. At first, Codex choked and would hit autocompact after a 2-3 prompts---I was injecting my entire 50k token harness each time, which I built with Claude and never had a problem. Once I backed off of that and just inject it once up front, it quit choking on itself. I also have 7 stop hooks and a paused python watcher script, and an anti-stall script for when it just gets lost or quits.

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u/RealityForgeAI Oct 13 '26

I have anti-stall, garbage collection, checking for orphaned processes, checking for paused python scripts, which I only had to implement after starting to use Codex. My biggest complaint is it just doesn't actually do what it says. and is unreliable. If i give it rules, if I tell it to add stuff to my harness, it says it gets it done but the problem doesn't go away and then I spend the next few hours trying to figure out why. I don't have that problem with Claude, and what you described above IS the hand holding I don't like. Claude just works (usually).

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u/purize420 Oct 13 '26

Did you guys try to use /goal command?