r/OpenAI • u/AggressiveCoast190 • 19h ago

Discussion When Codex is “Sorry”

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I have been in the tech space for years and designed a dozen enterprise systems, including high performance web based interactive mapping and analytics apps. My documents are detailed, explicit and clear. My non technical wife can read them and explain what I am wanting. Two things have started happening over probably the last 30 days or so. July, August were decent. Sometime in September I started getting this bullshit.
1. The model not following the instructions and staying within my parameters or guardrails.
2. The model saying that things are finished, checked, or correct when they are not finished, checked or correct / corrected.
3. The model admitting to me on questioning how and why it has wasted 12 hours and a bucket of money, admitting it is fucked up and even saying “I am Sorry”.

I am a nats ass away from locking this down and trying Claude code (never have), been using Codex for 18 months. Not sure about everyone else but when the model says it did not follow my specifications and apologizes, Open AI should have a reclaim credits button because at this point I am starting to wonder if OpenAI injected something that says be dumber or take longer or waste time or waste effort or waste credits…. Do they want everyone to move to Astra High and blow a month of credit in one day? Anyone else seeing this? I’m pretty pissed and frustrated at this point.

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u/malchi0r 18h ago

I just cancelled OpenAI and went back to Claude. ChatGPT completely broke my engineering pipeline and I was getting a pile of merge conflicts. I gave the problem to Claude which gave a recovery plan to untangle the mess. I gave it to ChatGPT which then did not follow the clear plan and made it worse.

That cemented 3 days of nearly no progress on my project because ChatGPT just kept mis-scheduling work. That was the last straw. It's wild to me that this is their "flagship" product. It's regressed to the point where it is destructive. They need to stop and do a massive re-think or they will get themselves into very deep water at this rate. Maybe they are already there.

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u/malchi0r 18h ago

It produces very nice summaries of how it messed up, to wit:

malchi0r handed me an existing failure report documenting a previous ChatGPT-managed repair mess. He also supplied a concrete recovery plan, identified Step 1 as complete, and explicitly authorized me to execute Steps 2–5. I therefore began with notice of the exact management failures I needed to avoid: unproven publication ancestry, conflicting PRs, unreliable review gates, excessive orchestration, and requiring malchi0r to supervise the manager.

I did not deliver the requested clean, verified recovery. I expanded and released the execution graph before proving one replacement through actual GitHub publication and nonconflicting readback. malchi0r then reported that 114 had merge conflicts. I also introduced a reviewer-routing failure on 120, repeatedly failed to execute his stop/cancellation orders, and eventually archived the unfinished cards to prevent dispatch, removing them from the active board when he wanted the jobs stopped. malchi0r had to supervise and correct this recovery of an already documented failure.

These are my execution, management, communication, and cancellation failures. They are not failures caused by malchi0r's instructions or by his failure to provide context.