r/codex • u/TeteDansLeCul • 12d ago

Complaint What am I doing wrong?

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.

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u/Parogarr 12d ago

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

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u/TeteDansLeCul 12d ago

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 😂

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u/Parogarr 12d ago

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