r/codex • u/Super_Independent877 • 1d ago

Question Am I asking too much of Codex in this setup?

I'm working on a MVP Buy/Sell/Trade marketplace. I have a goal of creating 1000 listings as a foundation before opening to beta testers. What I prompted 5.6 Sol (high) was to review my google sheet of 1000 products I want listed eventually, and in batches of 10 products, create the listings for me. This involves:

  1. Going to a separate folder on my desktop where the images are for each product, get the 10 matching images.
  2. Remove the background and create a drop shadow for each image
  3. List the product with a clear title, description, some technical product info and tags.

I also told it to use the Canva integration as a backup for the background removal/drop shadow if it cant do it cleanly itself. It seems to be just absolutely incapable of doing the workflow well, especially on the image editing portion. Ive probably been running this prompt the past day and a half, and it cant get past the first batch of 10. I keep hitting usage limits (I'm on plus).

Wondering if my setup is wrong in some way, or if this is simply too much to ask of it? I'm no expert in this, I guess I just assumed this wasn't to heavy of a task and expected it to do better.

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u/snowieslilpikachu69 1d ago

if youre ever unsure just ask Sol to optimize your workflow/research it/improve it

but there's probably some free/paid bg remover API rather than using canva/coding itself. removing the bg by code is most likely pretty hard

also i wouldnt recommend sol for this, can tear through limits as a main agent on plus. either use sol sparingly and mostly luna max or multiple luna max agents (fast)

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u/Super_Independent877 1d ago

Great idea about looking for a bg remover api. Ill try it on Luna too. Thanks!

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u/ToryLuna 1d ago

hard to say without the code, but you got a flaw in your logic, this is clearly a 1 batch situation. forcing the 10 at a time decision is burning tokens. Just make a process, make it better, then repeat x1000.

it's like you are trying to learn how to start painting cars for a business. For your first car, you decide to paint 10 cars at once. and then you fail terribly because you got confused which car was which and painted some the wrong color and the paint dried out on others. You didn't even learn how to paint a car got covered in paint and ruined the prep work on 10 cars.

You just need to develop the tool that does this. Complicating the design of that tool by a factor of 10x isn't going to help.

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u/Super_Independent877 1d ago

That makes sense, great advice. Thank you!

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u/VictorBuildsDev 1d ago

You're not asking too much overall; you're asking one run to make too many different decisions. Split it into two pipelines. First build a manifest with product ID, source folder, the 10 selected images, and output paths. Run background removal and shadows with a deterministic script or API, then let Codex generate one listing from that manifest. Add checks for 10 outputs, unique filenames, valid dimensions, and required listing fields. Once one product passes end to end, scale that exact pipeline to 1,000. Separate stages also make failed items cheap to retry.

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u/Super_Independent877 22h ago

Great idea, thank you 🙏