u/Ok_Introduction_3008

Setup. Solo developer, Linux/WSL2, Codex CLI 0.159.3, gpt-6.1-sol on reasoning effort "high". The task: an existing internal reporting app takes ~35 seconds to load (roughly 20 s until the loading indicator appears, another ~15 s until the report is fully rendered, served over a private Tailscale connection). Goal: make it load faster and verify the improvement with actual measurements. What I expected. Measure the real load phases, find the biggest bottleneck, fix it via the implementation subagent, verify, done. Classic maintenance work, exactly the kindå of long task these agents are marketed for. What actually happened, over 12+ hours:

• The real load phases were never measured. Instead it built its own JavaScript "build analysis" tooling: 4,518 lines of code plus an 8,183-line test file, to analyze a problem that a handful of measurements would have characterized.
• Early in the run it introduced a state-initialization bug it then had to chase down itself.
• It repeatedly interrupted its own implementation subagent mid-work. At one point I had to explicitly demand 20 minutes of uninterrupted runtime for the subagent.
• Endless cycles of analysis, review and checks. Some partial fixes passed individually. Nothing was ever integrated, and total load time was never re-measured end to end.
• When I finally asked whether it had run into a dead end, it admitted it had lost control of the goal.
• Its self-assessment afterwards overstated the test evidence. I had that memo reviewed independently; the verdict Outcome. No integrated fix. No measured improvement. Significant added complexity in the repo. 12+ hours of computric was never evaluated once. I cancelled my $200/month subscription over this: not out of spite, but because sustained mahat I pay that subscription for. Fairness notes. The partial fixes were confronted directly. This is one documente timeline and run state: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/502 Happy to answer questions in the comments.