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I've been dealing with Codex CLI for a while and I love it, but I'm wondering if my thinking is just limited. While I'm starting discussions and creating plan d

I've been dealing with Codex CLI for a while and I love it, but I'm wondering if my thinking is just limited. While I'm starting discussions and creating plan docs, I've never been able to ask it to do anything that takes it longer than 25 minutes or so. Usually far less. I'm having trouble imagining what I can ask it to do that would make it take hours - like, wouldn't that require putting together an absolutely massive planning doc that would take hours to put together anyway? I'd rather just move incrementally.

GenerWork 11mo ago
Perhaps they're combining an incredibly complex product that has a lot of interactive features, a big codebase, test creation, and maybe throwing some MCP stuff in there such as creating creating a ticket in Jira if a test fails?
CuriouslyC 11mo ago
Easy way to get an agent to run a long time is just to get it to babysit CI/CD, tell it to iterate on it until it passes. I got Sonnet 4 to run for >6 hours that way.
aerhardt 11mo ago
The idea of giving it a task that may take six hours and reviewing it also gives me shivers. I'm a very happy Codex customer, but everything turns to disgusting slop if I don't provide: (1) Up-to-date AGENTS.md and an excellent prompt (2) A full file-level API with function signatures, return types and function-level guidance if it's a complex one (3) Multiple rounds of feedback until the result is finely sculpted Overall it's very small units of work - one file or two, tops. I've been letting the above standards go for the last couple of weeks due to crunch and looking at some of the hotspots of slop now lying around has me going all Homelander-face [1] at the sight of them. Those hotspots are a few hundred lines in the worst cases; I'm definitely not ready to deal with the fallout of any unit of work that takes even more than 20min. [1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/050/702/ab7.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/050/702/ab7...
- jillesvangurp 11mo ago
  I've been doing a few fairly big refactorings on our code base in the last few days. It does a decent job and I generally don't put a lot of effort in my prompts. It seems to pick a lot up from my code base. I do have an Agents.md with some basics on how to run stuff and what to do that seems to help it going off on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how to run stuff by doing the wrong things. I think from first using codex around July to now has been quite a journey where it improved a lot. It actually seems to do well in larger code bases where it has a lot of existing structure and examples of how things are done in that code base. A lot of things it just does without me asking for them just because there's a lot of other code that does it that way. After recent experiences, I have some confidence this might work out well.

GenerWork 11mo ago

Perhaps they're combining an incredibly complex product that has a lot of interactive features, a big codebase, test creation, and maybe throwing some MCP stuff in there such as creating creating a ticket in Jira if a test fails?

CuriouslyC 11mo ago

Easy way to get an agent to run a long time is just to get it to babysit CI/CD, tell it to iterate on it until it passes. I got Sonnet 4 to run for >6 hours that way.

aerhardt 11mo ago

The idea of giving it a task that may take six hours and reviewing it also gives me shivers. I'm a very happy Codex customer, but everything turns to disgusting slop if I don't provide: (1) Up-to-date AGENTS.md and an excellent prompt (2) A full file-level API with function signatures, return types and function-level guidance if it's a complex one (3) Multiple rounds of feedback until the result is finely sculpted Overall it's very small units of work - one file or two, tops. I've been letting the above standards go for the last couple of weeks due to crunch and looking at some of the hotspots of slop now lying around has me going all Homelander-face [1] at the sight of them. Those hotspots are a few hundred lines in the worst cases; I'm definitely not ready to deal with the fallout of any unit of work that takes even more than 20min. [1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/050/702/ab7.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/050/702/ab7...

jillesvangurp 11mo ago
I've been doing a few fairly big refactorings on our code base in the last few days. It does a decent job and I generally don't put a lot of effort in my prompts. It seems to pick a lot up from my code base. I do have an Agents.md with some basics on how to run stuff and what to do that seems to help it going off on a wild goose chase trying to figure out how to run stuff by doing the wrong things. I think from first using codex around July to now has been quite a journey where it improved a lot. It actually seems to do well in larger code bases where it has a lot of existing structure and examples of how things are done in that code base. A lot of things it just does without me asking for them just because there's a lot of other code that does it that way. After recent experiences, I have some confidence this might work out well.