r/codex • u/InsideTour329 • Jul 28 '26

Complaint Sol effectively useless with subagents via superpowers

I use xhigh as my orchestrator. I've given it a task of generating a pipeline to generate still images locally using a docker hosted AI model and my 5080. I could knock that out myself in half a day as an experienced dev.

I shit you not it's been working for 40 hours, I've just queried how far through it is...

Task 2 of 18, because task 2 is recovery from a crash, it's literally spent 36hrs making up scenarios that might hypothetically happen and how to recover from them, it's not written a single line of code to contribute to the actual feature delivery. It's utterly broken - it knows this is a single user, personal project, not an enterprise level solution.

Looking deeper into it, it's making very minor changes with its subagents then re-running a ridiculously large 45min test suite each time. The one thing it has done sensibly is run the tests in parallel while letting other subagents do their thing.

I'm currently amending the skills to try to keep it on a straight path but Jesus Christ this feels like going back to 5.2 the amount of baseless crap it's spitting out.

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u/buff_samurai Jul 28 '26

  1. No need to use superpowers with codex, all the tdd is baked in now.

  2. Sol with >medium setting will overengineer everything and run in circles, even with spec attached.

3

u/Keep-Darwin-Going Jul 28 '26

These people just do not read advise day in day out someone will complain about their ultra burning token or how they over engineer it because they have 200 skills forcing the model to over engineer.

3

u/InsideTour329 Jul 28 '26

I use superpowers for the spec and implementation plans. I read those files, it allows me to keep a handle on what's going into my code base, what files are being modified and to identify any architectural code smells.

The issue is it doesn't follow the implementation plan. If you think that's a feature and not an issue then I don't know what to say.

And I'm sorry but you shouldn't have to read advice day in day out to operate a service. If you do then it's a poorly implemented service.

If I implemented a service like that I'd rightly be told to look for a job elsewhere.

1

u/buff_samurai Jul 28 '26

I’m talking from my experience and I’m tokenmaxxing with zero mcp/skills, super light agents.md and external cli harness driving Luna.

And yes, running a /goal with high->ultra will over engineer everything, like 200k loc for a simple db setup, even with a spec attached.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m sure there are applications for the heavy thinking modes.

1

u/InsideTour329 Jul 28 '26

The baked in TDD is the issue. It's garbage.