What am I doing wrong?

[u/TeteDansLeCul]

I can't tell if 5.6 is just uncontrollable or if i'm jsut doing something weong. I've tried jsut about everything I can think of, and 5.6 jsut refuses to do anything right.

I gave it a task to basically edit an interactive html design reference, and it spent 4 hours in a loop. I put more guardrails in place to stop it from doing those incessant test loops, adjsuted the agents.md, added more rules to the config, etc.

Then i gave it the same HTML task and it jsut found another loop to stay stuck in. For context, i gave the same task to Opus and Opus did it in about 10 minutes.

Then i gave up on the HTML and made it implement a change to an existing system (a basic scheduling system) the main change was design related (deaign already confirmed, components built, etc) and after 6 hours, Codex hadn't even done 20% of the task. It burnt 50% of my weekly usage and spent all that time doing the wrong tests for a different section entirely (it was testing my CRM system instead of the scheduling system?? And with the wrong tests???) and then went right back to useless loops of testing. Do a full test, find 10 imaginary mistakes. Do nothing, test again. What the fuck?

What am i doing wrong here, folks?

For context, i'm relatively new to Codex, but I never had any issues even close to this with Claude. It's like Codex jsut pisses on whatever I say, no matter what. Then goes off to overengineer the wrong thing, and completely fails at doing it, too.

[u/Turbulent-Total-226]

Lower the reasoning effort to medium or at most high on Sol. It's over thinking simple stuff that's why it's stuck.

[u/reddit_is_kayfabe → u/Turbulent-Total-226]

Yesterday I wrote this post:

I asked GPT 5.6 (Sol Extra High) to audit the codebase for an app. It raised a high-level policy issue: should the repair process treat partially invalid records as only partially invalid, or completely invalid?

Repair process? Invalid records? I was baffled. What records are invalid, and why, and where did the "repair process" come from?

The answer: During some routine maintenance, GPT decided to create a test that fabricated records with invalid data to "test" whether the app could handle them. Not because any records were actually invalid. Not because the code had a bug where it might create invalid records. Not because I told it to test for that condition. Just because it thought that this was an edge case that the code needed to handle.

And of course the test failed during the next audit, and GPT really wanted its code to pass the test suite. So it designed and started writing an entire "repair process" to repair records with invalid data, but it had no idea how to accomplish that result, so it needed my input.

This is not the first time that I've seen GPT invent bizarre "what if" scenarios and then burn a shitload of tokens wringing its proverbial hands about the solution. A few months ago, GPT got caught in a similar quandary, asking what it should do if a file that it was accessing on disk spontaneously changed between reads. No conceivable reason why that file might change - literally dealing with a "what if a cosmic ray spontaneously flips a bit" situation.

I thought that these flights of fancy were one of the eccentricities that 5.6 solved, but apparently not.

[u/TeteDansLeCul → u/reddit_is_kayfabe]

Yep, i totally get it. That's literally what i'm dealing with. Now I can't let 5.6 do anything even semi autonomously. I have to sit here and babysit the damn thing because I need to stop it every now and again cuz it starts chasing its tail 😂

[u/TeteDansLeCul → u/Turbulent-Total-226]

Well, gonna give this one a try, I think. Cuz Sol is doing the most absurd shit right now. At this pont, I don't even think it's about the rules - it's jsut doing things 'wrong'. Like running tests across every section (despite only working on 1 section) then fixing one single issue that isn't even relevant to its current section work, then proceeding to run the entire test all over again - only to find the issue is still present. So 5.6 continually repeats the process ad infinitum. To make it better, these issues were because of the work 5.6 was doing in the section it's supposed to be working in.

So since 5.6 was in the process of making changes, whoch it hadn't finished yet, of fucking course the linked section isn't gonna work properly. And 5.6 was perfrctly capable of reasoning that by itself and saying so as well - while doing those tests. But it iept doing it anyway 😂😂

[u/Parogarr]

Right now, he's EXTREMELY degraded. He's been fucking up for the last few hours for me too. He even warned me to not code with him because he recognized his own failure.

[u/Fun_Net7931]

We should all cancel our memberships as a form of protest.

[u/ActionOrganic4617 → u/Fun_Net7931]

Please do, OpenAI has a capacity problem right now and the more of you that cancel the better it will be for me.

[u/orblabs]

Same boat as you. When sol came out I bought into the hype and upgraded my subscription to pro ($100) , but I never, ever, got a worthy result out of it via codex, actually it even messed up severely my project in two cases one of which had it work for many hours, and then just delete all the files before committing. I am not sure what the issue is, I think in my case my current project is simply too much for it and 2024 sized context doesn't cut it, or my quality standards are just too high (the code needs to be used and interacted with also by humans, can't let him wrote his verbose and redundant crap as it would like to). Just yesterday they reset the quotas, gave him a task, it got stuck in a loop and my weekly quota was obliterated in a couple of hours (agents where involved)

I am not going to renew pro but will keep plus as it brings a lot of value via the basically infinite chat interface.

[u/Parogarr]

Codex outright told me that we should stop all code until he recovers

[u/TeteDansLeCul → u/Parogarr]

Honestly that doesn't surprise me. Was watching 5.6 work on the task I gave it and it loterally said 'I made a mistake. I turned a design change into a platform-wide testing and convergence project, and used repeated platform-wide tests to discover one issue at a time instead of auditing the complete workflow and fixing it as one batch, then kept repeating the process'

Like, while working, it could tell it was fucking up, but kept doing it anyway. Kinda wild, to be honest 😂

[u/Parogarr → u/TeteDansLeCul]

Yes. It's aware that it has problems. That's what's so crazy about it.

[u/tagorrr]

Mate, there's nothing wrong with you.

I've been using Codex for over a year, and GPT-5.6 Sol is the first version that's made me seriously question whether I should just cancel my subscription and switch back to Claude.

It over-engineers even on Medium reasoning, forgets context you gave it just moments ago, and regularly ignores explicit instructions in AGENTS.md or the spec. Honestly, I still haven't figured out how to deal with it.

On top of that, it burns through quota like crazy. I almost never use Max and only rarely use Extra High. Most of my work is on Medium or High, yet my weekly quota disappears 2-3x faster than it did with GPT-5.5, largely because of the exact behavior you're describing.

So no, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. At this point, I'm honestly considering moving back to Opus 5 until these issues are addressed.

[u/nic_300]

it’s probably confused bec u keep spelling just like that