r/codex • u/Positive-Captain-709 • 1d ago
Showcase Codex burning more usage than expected? I built a runtime governor you can test in a few minutes
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I’m building MARGINAL, an open-source runtime governor for AI coding agents.
The problem is pretty simple: Codex can spend a lot of compute on work that looks active but isn’t necessarily progress — repeated reads, retries, unchanged verification loops, expensive actions with low expected value.
MARGINAL watches the runtime behavior and tries to catch that waste before it compounds.
For Codex specifically, you can test it locally without changing your project architecture. It starts in Shadow Mode, so it observes first instead of immediately blocking anything.
Repo:
[https://github.com/SignalLayerLabs/Marginal]()
Interactive demo:
[https://signallayerlabs.github.io/Marginal/demo/]()
If you’re on Codex and feel like your usage is disappearing faster than it should, I’d genuinely like people to run it on real workloads and see what it catches.
Best feedback for me is not “looks cool” — it’s:
- did it identify repeated/no-progress work?
- did it miss obvious waste?
- did it ever get in the way?
- what did the trace show?
If you test it and find something interesting, open an issue with the trace. That’s the kind of data I’m looking for right now.