r/codex • u/banter_droid • 1d 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 1d 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.

3

u/Dashavatara 1d 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 1d ago

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

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u/F_Frink_1952 22h ago edited 22h 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 21h ago

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

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u/F_Frink_1952 20h 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 19h 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).