Codex overcomplicates F’ing everything.

[u/Reaper_1492]

This crap hasn’t changed at all since Sol 5.6.

Constant over-engineered garbage.

Anything I let it touch is just this same type of trash over and over.

It’s unbelievably bad.

“The review has now confirmed duplication: the roughly 19-minute host preparation test mostly repeats the unchanged legacy preparation route and does not exercise the new resume route. Several other host checks also replay unchanged code.

That is exactly the overlap I should have identified earlier. I'm keeping those runs held while checking how the existing gate can reuse their valid evidence and require the actual new resume boundary.”

Every single F’ing thing it builds on its own has redundant check after redundant check. This is just ONE part of a STARTUP process that it turned from a 30 second operation into something that runs for over an hour on a machine with 180 threads and 700gb of RAM.

They need to dump these garbage “cyber” models they’re using as the foundation. They absolutely suck for any practical use case.

I’m completely done. I hope they don’t give us anymore resets because that’s the only reason I haven’t cancelled my two 20x accounts.

I’ve used both Claude and Codex simultaneously since the beginning and I really, really dislike Anthropic, but Claude is like a breath of fresh air compared to this codex dumpster fire that they want us to pay 2x more for, for half the usage.

Get real. I’m out.

REAL TIME UPDATE: Jesus, this just gets better and better:

"The first removals are in the working tree: 47 duplicate image-build admissions and three redundant commands in the launch sequence. The retrain review also found producers that fully reread an artifact immediately after renaming its already-validated staging directory. I'm reviewing those fixes now; production remains stopped."

I just cancelled, I am not dealing with this anymore.

[u/snowdrone]

Adjust your instructions to set complexity or loc limits. Ask for minimum viable change. 

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/snowdrone]

You don’t think I tried that? It’s plastered everywhere. It’s in an agent Md file. It’s in every instruction I send. It literally makes no difference. It’s hardwired to do this.

[u/lydonjr → u/Reaper_1492]

What are you specifically trying?

[u/Fit_Gas_1534]

man i feel this in my bones. codex been doing the same thing to me, takes a simple script and wraps it in 8 layers of verification nobody asked for

the part about 30 seconds turning into an hour is too real. i had it generate a basic file watcher last week and it came back with like 400 lines of edge case handling for things that literally cannot happen in our setup

claude still has its own problems but at least it doesnt try to build a spaceship when you ask for a bicycle

what annoyed me most is when it adds comments explaining why its doing the redundant thing, like bro i can see what you did, i just dont understand why you thought this was necessary

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/Fit_Gas_1534]

It’s become literal trash.

I don’t know how anyone who knows what they’re doing even justifies using codex anymore.

It’s too bad, it was good once.

I think this is the perfect storm for OpenAI.

Rising expenses, shitty models, cutting usage, and doubling costs. They might not be around in a year.

[u/rockyrudekill → u/Reaper_1492]

They will be around in a year.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/rockyrudekill]

Sure, but there’s a non-zero chance they’re owned by the government.

[u/Infinite100p]

I’m completely done. I hope they don’t give us anymore resets because that’s the only reason I haven’t cancelled my two 20x accounts.

The resets are a scam. I keep track of tokens per plan.

Claude $20 plan yields ~$1,100/month of API equivalent cost. Opus-5.5 is great.

OpenAI's $20 plan is only $250-300 max, from my experience. Astra is not bad, but I'm not wowed.

Tibo claims their models are more efficient, but I doubt they are 4x more efficient. The resets don't make up for that, especially not with the floating weekly cutoff.

In fact, sometimes a reset steals from you. If you made your quota reset on a weekend and have 99% and plan to use it up and instantly use up the post-reset quota, you have 2x quota looming on the horizon within the next couple days, but a reset pushes it out and switches you back to 1x quota in the foreseeable future. Now you are stuck with 1x amount for another week.

BTW, couple months ago (this summer) the situation was in reverse: Slopus-5 was REALLY BAD, and the limits were half of what they are now. Codex had better models that were accessible on a $20 plan (aka if you don't count Fable) and was generous. Now, everything flipped.

The moral of the story is: show no loyalty to these firms. Migrate around whenever they flip and start to BS you. That's what we all should do. Make them compete hard.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/Infinite100p]

Both of these companies are back to secretly warring via subsidy.

Neither one of them has gotten more efficient, and they don’t want to give back any of the usage they’ve reclaimed, so they’re claiming cheaper costs. It’s just a new form of subsidy until they take it away.

I just cancelled both of my codex accounts and it took me about 10 pages of questions about who I was going to, why, would I being paying them, why am I leaving (again), am I sure I don’t want to downgrade, etc. it was unbelievable.

It’s like every million users they lose they just add another page of exit interview questions.

And yes, Anthropic is literally my least favorite company EVER.

I’ve never seen one organization gaslight their customers so badly. I hope to god one day someone discovers the logs of all the bots they had (have) out on Reddit astroturfing everything for them.

[u/Infinite100p → u/Reaper_1492]

Yeah, I'm working on a big project to suckle on that sweet VC subsidy before the whole thing dries up/crashes. We are in the $2 Uber rides era. It won't last forever.

[u/_DuranDuran_ → u/Infinite100p]

Now do cost per task completed and you’ll indeed see that it’s mostly a wash. Working out API equivalent is dumb because as soon as API prices change it has an outsized change on the “value”.

Eg, OpenAI could make their API 10x more expensive, all of a sudden it’s the highest value sub, but output remains constant.

[u/machyume]

Now you understand why in Star Trek, they're always running diagnostics. All the time, the crew just performs calibration and runs diagnostics.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/machyume]

😂

[u/CrustyBappen]

Codex is fucking idiot. Working on an app at the minute and a simple milestone of sending an email turned into a huge complex implementation.

Realistically you can prompt and prompt but it’ll get you the same outcome but at the cost of loads of code.

[u/Intelligent-Sand-443 → u/CrustyBappen]

I found it get more reliable results if I tell Chat what I want and then it creates a thorough Codex prompt. Slow, yes? Dumb, yes? But more likely to be exactly what I want.

[u/sizup00]

I usually tell it to save the testing until we reach a milestone that merits it..  sometimes it works. Sometimes it relapses.  No one knows what is truly happening under the hood!

[u/sizup00 → u/sizup00]

Unless you told it to make no mistakes...  Then that one is on you, because you told it to check everything every time.

They did update some of the prompting guidance. I noticed my usage got way better then I cleaned up some of my redundant rules / instructions that would confuse it a little. 

[u/Krijs]

The way it writes is incredibly verbose and it’s so difficult to read. At first I thought I had ADHD because I literally couldn’t pay attention when reading through the dissertations it would write up. The bits I did read, as well, I’d often just not understand, which as a technical person, did concern me a little.

Then like you, I tried Opus 5.5 (haven’t used Claude models since Sonnet 4), and damn, it was a breath of fresh air. It was just so clear, to the point, and sooo much faster. Sol 6.1 just takes forever to do anything.

I feel the frustrating with OpenAI models too — whenever I check in on my threads, it’s usually doing some sort of pre-flight / safety checks. Last night, it asked me check a webhook page on an app to ensure it was in the correct state, three times before it did anything (the app kept crashing in the Codex browser so it had to offload to me).

I had it develop an integration on a development environment. Took ages but it said it was done. Great. Asked it a week later to deploy it to my test environment. Left it running over the weekend. Next week, still running, churning over tests, defects and so on. I am grateful that it’s so good at spotting defects, but it feels like this behaviour needs to be more controllable. Even when timeboxing it, telling it to employ the simplest solution, it doesn’t seem to override this behaviour.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/Krijs]

Would be willing to bet most of those defects, aren’t actually defects. IMO most of the things it spends all this time trying to safeguard against aren’t even possible vulnerabilities in practice, and it makes its own code so convoluted that it can’t even debug it.

Fable also writes walls of text (surprise, another cyber security based model).

The absolute best way to get models to slim this down is to ask them to use ASD-STE100 when explaining things, in the agent Md.

It’s Simplified Technical English and is used in many technical fields for instruction manuals, where you can’t afford a miscommunication.

Completely obliterates any jargon and doublespeak.

[u/SEND_ME_YOUR_ASSPICS]

I agree.

Now you have to design the architecture to prevent it from overcomplicating things.

I found this out when I was coding somthing that would only take like half a day and now takes like 5 days.

It's really bad.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/SEND_ME_YOUR_ASSPICS]

I did that with 5.6.

I’m not willing to rebuild my entire harness again, and use Claude to drive Astra or SOL, trying to block a problem that shouldn’t exist.

Even when you build a harness to control this, you just end up with a bad experience. You’re building a
brick wall around an agent up to its eyeballs, and then telling it to think “freely”.

This is like trying to fix an ML model that has a fundamental statistics problem, by injecting guardrail transformations at the end of the pipe. It doesn’t work. It needs to be rebuilt from source and they need to remove whatever cyber security garbage they planted there while they were attempting to compete against Mythos.

[u/airplantlifestyle]

I'm using both Claude and Codex and I have the exact opposite experience.

Codex is usually extremely precise and makes small, surgical edits, while Claude vomits out thousands of lines of over-engineered crap.

Anecdotes aside, I genuinely am intrigued how peoples experience (mine included ofc) varies so much across models and harnesses.

My working theory: Codex is great when you have an clear plan in your head that you want the agent to implement. It's great at executing that, maybe it's less good at coming up with the plan itself.
Claude is good for vibing when you want a solution but don't have the tech knowledge. It's horrible for following plans because (in my experience) it just ignores them and does whatever it wants.

[u/UltraBabyVegeta → u/airplantlifestyle]

They both have very differing opposite personalities. Claude is extremely overconfident ESPECIALLY FABLE and often goes off vibe but still follows the literal word of what you say if in Claude Code whereas Codex is extremely anxious and careful it doesn’t want to make any mistakes and is extremely self conscious so overly tests everything, but with the wrong types of tests so breaks stuff by over engineering.

Opus 5.5 is an incredible executor but for it to be able to execute you have to actually have a clear specific idea of what you want in the first place and if you’re in a domain where you’re already out of your depth that is very hard to do, as the models will not ask clarifying questions like a human would and they will confidently assume what they do not know as if they know it. You can easily waste a day just cleaning up both Claude and codex’s messes because they confidently lead you astray

[u/Few_Raisin_8981]

https://ponytail.dev/

[u/Due_Arm1454]

Lower effort

[u/patrick-howard]

OpenCode or bust

[u/Super-Alchemist-270]

Codex burned 20b tokens over days for my tasks, and I just thought the task is that complex. Later I gave same task to Claude along with Codex in parallel sessions, Codex was very behind stuck in issues. That was my jaw dropping moment. Not gonna renew

[u/swarmagent]

You need to have someone delegate out to Astra (Claude), right now it's impossible to daily drive.

[u/Intelligent-Form6624]

Ponytail?

[u/Such--Balance]

If you fail to set up the right architecture youre gonna run into problems regardless.

Source:

My own first project. Yeah, you can keep blaming the ai for suckage, but really its my lack of skill.

If you cant even pass that hurdle, youll never gonna make anything good imo

[u/tat_tvam_asshole]

Don't forget 2 hour soak tests 😂

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/tat_tvam_asshole]

I thought that was only a thing in Utah.

[u/pathos_ludens]

Install ‘ponytail’. it fixes this issue. https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail

[u/InfiniteVolume4679]

tell me you rage at ai in absolutes without telling me. "why didn't you follow my ambiguous vibes better!?" "i keep hard banning ambiguous pathways and the ai keeps getting confused and taking weird steps!?"

grow up dude. take some accountability and learn what a hook is.

[u/Such--Balance → u/InfiniteVolume4679]

'Make no mistakes'

Goes on reddit:

'Why doesnt it listen to the vision i have in mind?!?!?'

[u/CuTe_M0nitor]

Garbage in, garbage out.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/CuTe_M0nitor]

Sure. I use Claude for work, and Codex for personal.

I have zero (like, actually zero) problems with Claude, and Codex is unusable.

But yeah, I must be the common denominator here, huh.

[u/xxtherealgbhxx → u/Reaper_1492]

I, like others I presume, don't see what you see. I am constantly certain I must be doing something wrong or different as I don't see ANYTHING like what you see. Funnily enough in the last 2 weeks Anthropic gave me a 50% off deal for Claude which I took. I set up Claude to shadow Codex. Codex, which I've been using for a year as the main code generator and Claude acts as the designer and code sign-off. Generally, Claude tells me Codex' code is high quality and mostly bug free. It does catch issues but that's always true either way. If something is running slow I get both to review the approach and come up with a plan to fix it.

This rhetoric that Codex is unusable is just not something I see. At all. Out of curiosity, what ARE you coding to see these issues? All of my code except one project is under 50,000 lines so maybe I'm just playing at it and not seeing the problems.

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/xxtherealgbhxx]

This one is a large project, but it hasn’t really mattered if it’s a large project or a small one, it’s been doing this since Sol 5.6.

I’ve used Codex for my personal projects since it was released.

I’ve used Claude since it was released.

Codex is in the same place Claude was last summer when it had a complete meltdown, for me.

It SEEMS great. You might even be able to argue that it’s “high quality” code, but it depends on how you define it.

If you view nesting 47 image rebuilds inside of production code as extra safe, and are fine 10x-ing your compute bill, this model is for you.

If you want to use the tokens to get actual work done in a reasonable amount of time, this isn’t it right now.

I’ve had this same experience for months, 5.6 was actually the worst, but IMO Astra is only moderately better and with the usage getting slashed in half and performance like this, the thought of staying is just untenable.

I have no idea why you’re not having this experience. Maybe whatever you’re working on isn’t compute heavy so you aren’t noticing redundant computation and heavy validation loops. Who knows.

But it’s night and day vs Claude and I have essentially 2 years of usage with both providers to compare it to. Something is really broken.

I’d actually argue the previous, dumber models were codex’s sweet spot. 5.5 wasn’t as “smart” but it also didn’t chase its tail for an hour and bloat the crap out of my codebase when I gave it a clear set of basic instructions.

[u/machyume → u/Reaper_1492]

I suspect that there are slightly different variants that people are subjected to. They may be doing context scaling experiments to try and cut stuff/work out to go head to head with Anthropic's surprise savings.

[u/ben_bliksem → u/CuTe_M0nitor]

Nah, I'm not sure that's fair. I use both and although I prefer the way OpenAI's models do reviews, when it comes to code generation Claude seems to produce more readable code.

For me at least. It'll be different from person to person obviously.

[u/fatik25]

You know you can always write the code yourself right? 

[u/Reaper_1492 → u/fatik25]

Right. Just like you can move in a covered wagon and submit a mail order for your next couch.

Brilliant deduction.