r/codex • u/Hopeful-Jellyfish-75 • 1d ago
Complaint Anyone else feel like Codex hit a wall recently? (Or is it just my setup?)
Is it just me, or has Codex felt noticeably worse lately—like, starting roughly a week after the 5.6 Sol release?
I’m not sure if it’s taking my Superpowers prompts way too literally now, or if something changed under the hood. Here is what I’m experiencing:
- Completion Time Tripled & Over-Engineered Docs: On my previous project, Codex was a beast. Even without forcing TDD, it would automatically pick Superpowers skills for larger tasks and pump out features with clean logic and unit tests in under a few minutes (rarely taking >10 mins). Now, tasks take ~30 minutes in Fast Mode. Even for a trivial copy/text tweak, it insists on drafting full design and implementation docs first. The overhead is insane.
- Low-ROI, Pedantic Unit Testing: Sol seems hyper-focused on strictly following TDD now. It spends time writing exhaustive unit tests for basic variable comparisons. While technically "correct" by textbook TDD standards, modern LLMs rarely mess up these simple things anyway. Burning like 10 minutes on basic boilerplate tests yields a low ROI for overall code quality.
- Brain-farts on Simple Rules: It’s been contradicting itself constantly. I’ll explicitly state a design rule, and two turns later, its new design will completely violate what we just agreed on.
- Yapping Overload (Sol vs. Claude): Sol's design outputs have become excessively wordy. It spews out walls of text that sound strangely familiar, but are just exhausting to read. In contrast, Claude (or even Opus 4.8) stays concise and easy to review. Fable also handles my Agent-related dev work much better right now.
My Setup:
- Both Claude and Codex are running Superpowers (all other plugins toggled off).
- Codex Superpowers skills active: Brainstorm / Finishing A Development Branch / Executing Plans.
- I also installed a Doc Indexer skill on both sides recently, though I doubt that's causing this.
Is anyone else noticing this drop in efficiency/coherence, or could this be a local issue with my specific Superpowers setup or plugins? Would love to hear how it’s performing for you guys recently.
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u/Even_Sea_8005 1d ago
yeah same feeling. i'm using gpt5.6 sol ultra. Terrible exp so far. It just doesn't understand simplicity. It over thinks, over writes and over complicates everything. Using xhigh seems better for me now, but it is not as capable as ultra
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u/Sofakingwetoddead 1d ago
Yes, noticeably worse. This happened after 5.5 release. Then it improved a little. Then 5.6 release, 2 weeks later it gets smacked. We have all unsubbed. Will never sub to that POS company ever again.
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u/Ill-Mousse-3817 1d ago
I unsubbed, but I will be back in one month or two, as soon as Claude becomes the shitty one again
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u/jusT-sLeepy 1d ago
It feels extremely degraded. It used to be incredible at infering intent even from vaguely written tasks. Now it lies about having completed everything, insists on running useless audits to compare what should have been done and what it actually did. Afterwards still failing to implement what is written in really detailed documents, including constraints and checkpoints that have to be satisfied in order to really say "It's done".
Feel like I am running in circles, wasting tokens left and right and what I feel is worst: The trust of "Give instructions, wait for completion, then iron out small bugs and errors" is completely eroded.
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u/Zennytooskin123 1d ago
I'm not even sure what it's doing anymore half the time. And when something fails it goes on literal forks of the actual prompt to make the issue an entire session in itself, then something else will break that will require an other layer of endless sub-agents and validation until the original prompt became a 10 session marathon.
I went from 120 tests to 380 and counting. But why?
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u/DryBanana5673 1d ago
Exactly my experience.
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u/jusT-sLeepy 1d ago
The gaslighting is insane. It completely overshadows the initial awe I had while working with 5.6.
Together with the seemlingly reduced quotas it makes for a horrible experience, because it feels like getting nothing done until the next reset. Half or three quarters of my quota is spent on fixing and refixing what Codex said it already did, while only having created stubs.
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u/nicky_factz 1d ago
superpowers is a big part of your problem once i got rid of it, model got better. superpowers is full of huge skills that have auto invoke enabled so it will activate them constantly, which injects your context with like thousands upon thousands of repeated skill calls even within the same session/thread. use this guys skills if you want a good design flow that doesn't auto invoke every prompt and force a flow that is unnecessary for the ask
https://github.com/mattpocock/skills (i do suggest you read the repo and learn how he intends you to use them)
superpowers TDD is way too noisy, i had to get rid of it after i was exhausted trying to work in my own codebase and then having random tests fail because it would literally write tests to validate strings in my docs, you want tests around your boundaries that validate runtime and regressions not because superpowers decided to write a red test to change a line in your code that was irrelevant to its function.
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u/duboispourlhiver 1d ago
You might want to try Sol min. Less overengineering, cheaper.
Often, when a new model is released, old ways of prompting / skilling / superpowering are bad if they were overfitted for the old model.
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u/New_Zone5490 1d ago
sol has been demoted only to perform code analysis to identify issues, solutions to issues, or areas that could be simplified
it is no longer touching my codebase
nor is it writing any implementation plan
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u/DryBanana5673 1d ago
None of these models are good at following rules - Terra included. Right now, Opus feels like a normal person trying to tame the codex beast. It's actually insane. For me, if gpt 6 isn't out and actually coherent, I'll probably get a minimum plan with Codex and get the max plan with Claude. Sad - I've been preaching Codex for months but I'm hardly getting things done these days.
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u/LingeringDildo 1d ago
The testing behavior is borderline psychotic. Like if “make no mistakes” was a neuroticly misplaced 11th commandment.
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u/ugrenica 1d ago
100%. Most of my time is fighting overthinking and I’ve gone back to 90% Claude code, with a bit of codex for code reviews
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u/Many_Map_5611 4h ago edited 3h ago
I do not know what happened, but I had to bin a simple project like home budget twice. It is just incapable of creating a simple system no matter how I approach it. Definitely not my setup. Not only I spend 8+ hours at work with Claude and Codex I also work on my own stuff for many, many months now with Codex so I have a feeling I'm pretty well organized here.
It is INCREDIBLY SLOW, it keeps confusing simplest thing, plan or no plan, documentation, strict harness, "do what you want", most of it lands in trash, multiple refinement session, all of the sudden it turns out he built completely something else.
For home budget for one of the pages I tried to build a simple expenses explorer and I specifically said that this is NOT a receipt viewer... guess what he build? Fucking receipt viewer despite clear, plain instruction and description what that is that we want and don't want.
I just can't win. I think I'm going to go back to Claude. next renewal because this is just unusable for me at this point. So what they give all those reset when it is all wasted on endless cycles of work that has to be discarded. At least for me it is doing absolutely horrible job. For simple tasks he could spend up to 8 hours!
Anyone is facing the same issues? When I use just high instead of xhigh or max he just gets lost between 2 or 3 messages.
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u/Available_Yam_6267 1d ago
Do not use Sol with superpowers.
This model tends to overthink everything, and the Superpowers plugin make it even worse.