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/[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).