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These 2 sentences right next to each other stood out to me: > a new step towards becoming a reliable coding partner > GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max is built for long-runn

by taurath 11mo ago

These 2 sentences right next to each other stood out to me: > a new step towards becoming a reliable coding partner > GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max is built for long-running, detailed work Does this not sound contradictory? It’s been the shorter form work that has built what little confidence I have in these as a coding partner - a model that goes off and does work without supervision is not a partner to me.

causal 11mo ago
Absolutely contradictory. The long-running tendency for Codex is why I cannot understand the hype around it: if you bother to watch what it does and read its code the approaches it takes are absolutely horrifying. It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available.
- keeganpoppen 11mo ago
  these things are actually fixable with prompting. is it easy? no. is it PEBKaC if you don’t do anything to change course as it builds a TLS library? yes, but paperclip maximized! xD
  - causal 11mo ago
    Or you can have a model with some semblance of common sense that will stop and say "Hey I can I have access to the network to do X?" Codex feels like a tool designed to run after all the humans are gone.
- meowface 11mo ago
  >It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available. This is definitely one of the biggest issues with coding agents at the moment. That said, from my experience, Codex so often does things that are so useful and save me so much time that the occasional "oh god what the hell did it just go off and do" are an acceptable cost for me. I regularly get great results with open-ended prompts and agents that spend 15+ minutes working on the task. I'm sure they'll eventually get better at common sense understanding of what kind of work is wasteful/absurd.
ntonozzi 11mo ago
If you haven't, give Cursor's Composer model a shot. It might not be quite as good as the top models, but in my experience it's almost as good, and the lightning fast feedback is more than worth the tradeoff. You can give it a task, wait ten seconds, and evaluate the results. It's quite common for it to not be good enough, but no worse than Sonnet, and if it doesn't work you just wasted 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.
- ineedasername 11mo ago
  Also: Qwen3 coder. Highly usable, in it's smaller form as well.
embirico 11mo ago
(Disclaimer: Am on the Codex team.) We're basically trying to build a teammate that can do both short, iterative work with you, then as you build trust (and configuration), you can delegate longer tasks to it. The "# of model-generated tokens per response" chart in [the blog introducing gpt-5-codex](https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/) shows an example of how we're improving the model good at both.
- Jaiden333 11mo ago
  I really wish model performance messaging and benchmarks were more focused on perfecting short, iterative tasks instead of long-running work. As a startup founder and engineer, I'm not constrained by the number of 10000+ line diff, 0->1 demos I can ship. I'm constrained by quality of the 100 -> 101, tight 150 line feature additions / code cleanups I can write. It feels like the demos, funding, and hype all want to sell me entire PR rewrites, but what I need is the best possible iterative work model that will keep me in the loop. I still use codex - but I use codex incredibly iteratively (give it very narrowly scoped tasks, and I watch it like a hawk, giving tons of feedback). I don't use it because of its ability to code for 24 hours. I use it because when I give it those narrowly scoped tasks, it is better at writing good code than any other model. (Because of its latency, I have 2-4 of these conversations going on at the same time). But there is a lot of friction the codex product + model adds to this process. I have to prompt aggressively to override whatever "be extremely precise" prompting the model gets natively so that it doesn't send me 20+ bullet points of extraordinarily dense prose on every message. I have to carefully manage its handling of testing; it will widen any DI + keep massive amounts of legacy code to make sure functionality changes don't break old tests (rather than updating them) and to make sure any difficult tests can have their primary challenges mocked away. In general, codex doesn't feel like an amazing tool that I have sitting at my right hand. It feels like a teenage genius who has been designed to do tasks autonomously, and who I constantly have to monitor and rein in.
- theshrike79 11mo ago
  My experience is completely different. Codex(-cli) is an outsourced consultant who refuses to say "I can't do that" and will go to extreme lengths to complete a task fully before reporting anything. It's not a "teammate". It also doesn't communicate much while it's working compared to Claude. So it's really hard to interrupt it while it's making a mistake. Also, as a Go programmer, the sandbox is completely crazy. Codex can't access any of the Go module caches (in my home directory) and it has to result to crazy tricks to bring them INSIDE the project directory - which it keeps forgetting to do (as the commands have to run with specific ENV_VARS) and just ... doesn't run tests for example, because it couldn't. The only way I've found to make that problem go away is run it with the --omg-super-dangerous-give-every-permission-ever switch just so that it can do the basic work I need it to do. Maybe give us an option between the ultra-safe sandbox that just refused to run "ps" 15 minutes ago to check if a process is running and the "let me do anything anywhere" option. Some sane defaults please.

by taurath 11mo ago

causal 11mo ago

Absolutely contradictory. The long-running tendency for Codex is why I cannot understand the hype around it: if you bother to watch what it does and read its code the approaches it takes are absolutely horrifying. It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available.

keeganpoppen 11mo ago
these things are actually fixable with prompting. is it easy? no. is it PEBKaC if you don’t do anything to change course as it builds a TLS library? yes, but paperclip maximized! xD
- causal 11mo ago
  Or you can have a model with some semblance of common sense that will stop and say "Hey I can I have access to the network to do X?" Codex feels like a tool designed to run after all the humans are gone.
meowface 11mo ago
>It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available. This is definitely one of the biggest issues with coding agents at the moment. That said, from my experience, Codex so often does things that are so useful and save me so much time that the occasional "oh god what the hell did it just go off and do" are an acceptable cost for me. I regularly get great results with open-ended prompts and agents that spend 15+ minutes working on the task. I'm sure they'll eventually get better at common sense understanding of what kind of work is wasteful/absurd.

ntonozzi 11mo ago

If you haven't, give Cursor's Composer model a shot. It might not be quite as good as the top models, but in my experience it's almost as good, and the lightning fast feedback is more than worth the tradeoff. You can give it a task, wait ten seconds, and evaluate the results. It's quite common for it to not be good enough, but no worse than Sonnet, and if it doesn't work you just wasted 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

ineedasername 11mo ago
Also: Qwen3 coder. Highly usable, in it's smaller form as well.

embirico 11mo ago

(Disclaimer: Am on the Codex team.) We're basically trying to build a teammate that can do both short, iterative work with you, then as you build trust (and configuration), you can delegate longer tasks to it. The "# of model-generated tokens per response" chart in [the blog introducing gpt-5-codex](https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/) shows an example of how we're improving the model good at both.

Jaiden333 11mo ago
I really wish model performance messaging and benchmarks were more focused on perfecting short, iterative tasks instead of long-running work. As a startup founder and engineer, I'm not constrained by the number of 10000+ line diff, 0->1 demos I can ship. I'm constrained by quality of the 100 -> 101, tight 150 line feature additions / code cleanups I can write. It feels like the demos, funding, and hype all want to sell me entire PR rewrites, but what I need is the best possible iterative work model that will keep me in the loop. I still use codex - but I use codex incredibly iteratively (give it very narrowly scoped tasks, and I watch it like a hawk, giving tons of feedback). I don't use it because of its ability to code for 24 hours. I use it because when I give it those narrowly scoped tasks, it is better at writing good code than any other model. (Because of its latency, I have 2-4 of these conversations going on at the same time). But there is a lot of friction the codex product + model adds to this process. I have to prompt aggressively to override whatever "be extremely precise" prompting the model gets natively so that it doesn't send me 20+ bullet points of extraordinarily dense prose on every message. I have to carefully manage its handling of testing; it will widen any DI + keep massive amounts of legacy code to make sure functionality changes don't break old tests (rather than updating them) and to make sure any difficult tests can have their primary challenges mocked away. In general, codex doesn't feel like an amazing tool that I have sitting at my right hand. It feels like a teenage genius who has been designed to do tasks autonomously, and who I constantly have to monitor and rein in.
theshrike79 11mo ago
My experience is completely different. Codex(-cli) is an outsourced consultant who refuses to say "I can't do that" and will go to extreme lengths to complete a task fully before reporting anything. It's not a "teammate". It also doesn't communicate much while it's working compared to Claude. So it's really hard to interrupt it while it's making a mistake. Also, as a Go programmer, the sandbox is completely crazy. Codex can't access any of the Go module caches (in my home directory) and it has to result to crazy tricks to bring them INSIDE the project directory - which it keeps forgetting to do (as the commands have to run with specific ENV_VARS) and just ... doesn't run tests for example, because it couldn't. The only way I've found to make that problem go away is run it with the --omg-super-dangerous-give-every-permission-ever switch just so that it can do the basic work I need it to do. Maybe give us an option between the ultra-safe sandbox that just refused to run "ps" 15 minutes ago to check if a process is running and the "let me do anything anywhere" option. Some sane defaults please.