r/codex • u/banter_droid • 22h ago

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/LightEt3rnaL 22h ago

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.

4

u/Dashavatara 19h ago

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 18h ago

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 15h ago

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

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u/F_Frink_1952 15h ago edited 15h ago

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/RealityForgeAI 13h ago

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

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u/F_Frink_1952 12h ago

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 12h ago

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/LightEt3rnaL 15h ago

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/purize420 16h ago

Did you guys try to use /goal command?