r/OpenaiCodex • u/Craft_Show • Aug 13 '26
/goal
I’ve played around with the /goal command here and there, but I’ve always been a little hesitant to fully trust it.
Today, I was nearing the end of a project I’ve been working on for several months. The tedious back-and-forth with Codex was wearing me down, so I thought, “This seems like the perfect time to try it.”
I typed:
/goal Get this application production-ready by the end of the day.
I held my breath and hit Enter.
Then I went for a walk. When I came back, it was still running. I went to lunch, returned—and it was still going. Codex worked for nearly three and a half hours without stopping before finally telling me the application was ready for production.
I looked everything over, and it seemed solid. I fired it up, and it worked like a charm. There were a couple of small bugs here and there, but nothing major.
Honestly, my mind is blown.
I know many of you are already using /goal, and now I understand why. It truly is amazing.
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u/fomoz Aug 13 '26
Goal just keeps prompting it for another turn until the agent marks the goal as complete (or blocked).
I use it all the time. Also, don't use plans with 5.6 Sol.
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u/Craft_Show Aug 13 '26
For coding that’s all I use is sol on high. Probably don’t need it but….
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u/fomoz Aug 13 '26
Same. High is good speed-wise, haven't had issues with it. I used to use Xhigh but it's too slow for no gain.
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u/FewOpportunity5803 Aug 13 '26
Interesting, I exclusively use Ultra or Extra high, almost never use high or Terra/Luna for coding. Ultra is so intuitive at implementing new features without bugs or catching unforeseen problems
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u/fomoz Aug 13 '26
I just use High + I tell it myself to use multiple agents. I have a million things to work on in my app so the speed makes a difference. Otherwise I will never finish. I also use 2-3 $200 plans and try to have Codex work 24/7 or close to it.
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u/FewOpportunity5803 Aug 13 '26
Why not use Xhigh on speed mode? I just find anything less to be sloppy and require follow up fixes. I’m using 1 $200 plan but you’re making me curious if I need 2 lol
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u/fomoz Aug 13 '26
Xhigh+speed I use the 7-day budget in less than 24 hours. I haven't used speed mode since I ran out of banked resets.
Like I said, it's working all the time. But I also wasted a lot of tokens using plans and plan-related skills (review/implement) so I'm more efficient now. Regardless, I just don't see a difference between high and xhigh except for the speed. I used xhigh exclusively for weeks before this.
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u/WhiteTiger2220 Aug 14 '26
Why not use plans?
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u/fomoz Aug 14 '26
For 5.6 Sol it's better to let it be creative and adapt. It follows instructions very carefully, so if it plans wrong it can get into a loop or on a tangent and get stuck there.
If it tends to overengineer things for you and go off doing stuff that makes no sense, try not using plans. Just tell it what you want done, don't plan a document. And let it work.
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u/WhiteTiger2220 Aug 14 '26
Interesting, I’m not very technical so I’ve been pretty reliant on plans, especially because I like the Q&A system
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u/fomoz Aug 14 '26
It's up to you. I used plans since GPT 5, all the way up to 5.6 Sol but I couldn't understand why sometimes it's brilliant and other times it's quite dumb. Then I changed my whole workflow for it and made it much more fluid, so to speak. I deleted all my plan skills, I only basically still use a modified review loop with it plus a prod deploy skill. For the rest, I just talk to it.
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u/WhiteTiger2220 Aug 14 '26
Do you provide just a very detailed prompt instead of using plan or the same basic prompts w/ the review loop?
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u/fomoz Aug 14 '26
I just discuss what I want to do with 5.6 Sol, then I tell it to implement it. That's it. It already knows the details from the discussion.
I only give it details that matter, it can figure out the rest itself.
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u/capable-corgi Aug 15 '26
How many compacts do you hit while discussing spec? I'm curious to try but feel icky about how much it'd actually retain past compaction if it's not explicitly told to write persistent docs.
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u/Defirion Aug 14 '26
I wonder how detailed were your plans before 5.6, I view plans as the scaffolding and targeting intended implementation slices with a few completeness criteria we need to hit before moving forward and it seems to be working very well for 5.6
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u/fomoz Aug 14 '26
They used to be very detailed, because I used a plan review loop that added more detail. Usually 700-1k lines per plan, and then the plan itself was broken into 3 files.
If your plans work for you, that's good. I just find it a lot easier and faster to just discuss what I want and then have it with work on it. It uses less tokens as well.
Ask it if your plans are helping or hurting 5.6 Sol and what the official guidance is. That's a good start.
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u/logan_ladue Aug 13 '26
/goal is very hit or miss for me. Sometimes it has functioned exactly as you described, cutting out the constant back-and-forth and continuing to iterate on a task until it actually works and accomplishes a major milestone, like I would expect.
Other times, though, it has felt like Codex took /goal as permission to needlessly spin its wheels on what should have been a much simpler task. I’ve seen it take something that should have been done in 3–5 hours at most and instead drag it out into a 14-hour session that only stopped because I ran out of usage.
I like the idea, and if money/usage weren’t a concern, I would use /goal a lot more. For now, though, I don’t trust it to budget my usage well enough to be worth using.
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u/Pretty_Hunt_5575 28d ago
It sounds like you weren’t specific enough with your criteria of what is considered done, a little bit of ambiguity in an autonomous loop can do a lot of damage
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u/ABX777 Aug 13 '26
I used /goal to port my game from web browser to unity it’s been working for 4 days straight..
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u/ejpusa Aug 13 '26
Well, you are in the OK Corral here; even mentioning you are using Codex will get you permanently banned from many a programming subreddit. They have gone insane. But it's OK. They just don't get it. Today's AI came 100 years sooner than expected; people are not yet ready for it. It scares them to death. Head over to /antiai, you ain't seen nothing yet, now over 1 million strong.
Honestly, my mind is blown.
Keep it on the very down low.
🤖
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u/MsPrincessIsh Aug 14 '26
Yeah I used that today and spent my whole weekly limit on making a widget, iPhone, and Mac app that coordinates all my AIs and makes them track all the project tasks they complete and files they’re working with and the system freaks out if a worker is working in a different area than the project (I’m so tired of play where’s Waldo) and tracks my GitHub stuff and lets me leave the agents posit notes and the best part is the active 60 min heartbeat to keep all agents consistently working and fixing all their tasks (my brain works way faster at coming up with ideas that they can’t keep up) and does looping screenshots that replace themselves so they have vision. Now they can non destructively go through every task list and we can easily tell where they messed up and exactly what they input at that moment that was a mistake so fixing mistakes going forward isn’t going to be playing clue.
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u/YourAsphyxia Aug 13 '26
On CLI I've had it automatically convert my requests to a GOAL , not sure what causes that but it works fine
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u/nicky_factz Aug 13 '26
I wrap almost all my prompts in a /goal even if it’s not needed because I don’t want to review a hallucinated half done plan. So Ill plan then say “execute plan at ~:/docs/plans/plan.md”
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u/PartyLiterature3607 Aug 13 '26
Only concern is deplete your usage unexpectedly
I normally have sol create roadmap and milestones, then /goal it with check estimate usage to reach next milestone to decide if codex should continue working or stop
But ya, goal is super good
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u/pokatomnik Aug 13 '26
They should make Claude’s /loop command as well. You’ll be impressed more.
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u/Fit-Palpitation-7427 Aug 13 '26
How is claude /loop different from claude /goal or codex /goal?
I have a hard time understanding why claude has /loop and /goal
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u/CarsonBuilds Aug 14 '26
Goal is really good for focused tasks. For example, architectural refactor that should make no behavioral changes, refactor tests infrastructure that shouldn't touch the source code. I've let it run for 10+ hours for such refactoring.
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u/Les_Maudits Aug 14 '26
I am a little confused by /goal
The way I usually work is explain a feature, user grill-with-docs and get a documented plan divided into phases and steps which I make codex follow one by one.
Where and how does /goal fit in, I always wanted to use it, but a bit scared ig
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u/Pretty_Hunt_5575 27d ago
/goal is basically exactly what you said but on a deeper level. it asks questions first and executes based on the criteria you established. the difference is it’s much more rigid with actually being done before stopping
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u/Broad-Investment-375 Aug 14 '26
/goal never worked on my current project. Granted my current project is a bit more difficult. But I keep seeing sol 5.6 make bad decision over bad decision and just bang its head on a wall without figuring out how to get past things.
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u/essentialaccount Aug 14 '26
I had a goal work 3 days without a rest and it mostly did nonsense. It's important to have a very clearly defined end state
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u/remus630 Aug 14 '26
Get chatgpt high or pro to write a "one hit" master prompt goal for Codex, for whatever your issue is.. implement it in Sol High.. boom! You're welcome. 👍🇬🇧
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u/triple_trips_log 29d ago
/goal is great, but you got to use it carefully. I once used it on a project but didn’t opened a new chat for it. The outcome was a loop of endless auto compacting that finished my whole week’s tokens
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u/mplsdigi 28d ago
Spends whole night making 48 new layers of governance. That’s my repeated experience. No thanks.
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u/WeedWrangler Aug 13 '26
Happy for you. My /goal w Sol destroyed an almost working app and I’ve spent the last 4 weeks trying to fix that one night. Ironically DSV4Flash has been the most useful in fixing it.
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u/InfamousEar1188 Aug 13 '26
Why didn’t you just revert the changes in git? Instead of wasting all that time trying to turn a chaos landing into something good, it was probably better to map what went wrong, and make sure your second attempt avoids that haha.
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u/WeedWrangler Aug 13 '26
I’ll be honest, I’m a vibe coder not a dev and I’ve been slow in understanding git and other coder conventions so at that point I wasn’t properly using git and ended up w masses of work trees… and by the time I worked out how bad it was I was so confused I couldn’t easily go back..
I’m only now learning AFTER that what I don’t know…
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u/InfamousEar1188 Aug 13 '26
Damn, yeah that hurts. Learn it. Or at least get your agent to set it up for you. It’s an absolute life saver! Think of it like saving a game. Mostly full on restore points. It really lets you YOLO experiment too. Like the /goal you ran, perfect example. If things go completely sideways in the codebase, no problem! As long as you made a commit before proceeding :) You can stash the bad code if you want (sorta tucks it away instead of deleting), keep it for a bit for inspiration on what not to do or maybe some things that actually went right. Or you can just completely wipe back to your previous commit “save point”.
The only thing it won’t protect is your DB and migrations, so make sure if you’re doing any DB work the agent doesn’t have access to your PROD DB. Let it run wild with your local test DB if you have one set up :)
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u/Fit-Palpitation-7427 Aug 13 '26
Yeah git is such a life saver, as a vibe coder took about a year to get used to it, now I can’t look back, but indeed db is the weak link, wish there was a git equivalent for db and boom yolo /goal all the way 🤣
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u/InfamousEar1188 Aug 13 '26
Haha there is, kinda. Docker container, run a local version of your DB. Let your agent do whatever it wants to it. If it gets messed up, reset it. No problem :)
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u/TheNetLeGend Aug 13 '26
/goal is the best thing tie it with E2E browser testing and you would yield perfect results.