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Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

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Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#32
post #10

These 2 sentences right next to each other stood out to me: > a new step towards becoming a reliable coding partner > GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max is built for long-running, detailed work Does this not sound contradictory? It’s been the shorter form work that has built what little confidence I have in these as a coding partner - a model that goes off and does work without supervision is not a partner to me.

If you haven't, give Cursor's Composer model a shot. It might not be quite as good as the top models, but in my experience it's almost as good, and the lightning fast feedback is more than worth the tradeoff. You can give it a task, wait ten seconds, and evaluate the results. It's quite common for it to not be good enough, but no worse than Sonnet, and if it doesn't work you just wasted 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#33
post #15

Rest assured that we are better at training models than naming them ;D - New benchmark SOTAs with 77.9% on SWE-Bench-Verified, 79.9% on SWE-Lancer, and 58.1% on TerminalBench 2.0 - Natively trained to work across many hours across multiple context windows via compaction - 30% more token-efficient at the same reasoning level across many tasks Let us know what you think!

Compaction is just what Claude Code has done forever, right?

I think the point here is not that it does compaction (which Codex also already does) - but that the model was trained with examples of the Codex compaction, so it should perform better when compaction has taken place (a common source for drops in performance for earlier models).

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#34
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to context-window limits

context window is not some physical barrier but rather the attention just getting saturated. what did i get wrong here?

> what did i get wrong here?

You don't know how an LLM works and you are operating on flawed anthropomorphic metaphors.

Ask a frontier LLM what a context window is, it will tell you.

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#35
post #15

Rest assured that we are better at training models than naming them ;D - New benchmark SOTAs with 77.9% on SWE-Bench-Verified, 79.9% on SWE-Lancer, and 58.1% on TerminalBench 2.0 - Natively trained to work across many hours across multiple context windows via compaction - 30% more token-efficient at the same reasoning level across many tasks Let us know what you think!

Looks like a great change! I'll take it for a spin in a moment.

I really like the "subagent" feature in Claude Code — it's super useful to manage context in complex codebases. Here are some examples of agents that can be useful: https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/tree/main/.claude/a...

Would it make sense to have a similar feature in Codex CLI? I often do "spec-driven development", which is basically a loop of:

    research -> implementation plan -> actual implementation (based on research + plan) -> validation
I have multiple subagents that I use for each phase that (based on subjective judgement) improve the output quality (vs keeping everything, every tool use etc. in the "main" context window).

Codex CLI is great and I use it often but I'd like to have more of these convenient features for managing context from CC. I'm super happy that compaction is now available, hopefully we'll get more features for managing context.

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compaction is just what Claude Code has done forever, right?

I think the point here is not that it does compaction (which Codex also already does) - but that the model was trained with examples of the Codex compaction, so it should perform better when compaction has taken place (a common source for drops in performance for earlier models).

Codex previously did only manual compaction, but yeah, maybe some extra training for compaction, too?

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#37

> Compaction enables GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max to complete tasks that would have previously failed due to context-window limits, such as complex refactors and long-running agent loops by pruning its history while preserving the most important context over long horizons. In Codex applications, GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max automatically compacts its session when it approaches its context window limit, giving it a fresh context window. It…

Attention is quadratic, so you have to pick a cutoff for context window size. In addition, the error/noise in state space increases with longer contexts, resulting in poorer performance. So even if you're willing to take the O(n^2) slowdown of a larger context window, it still won't work.

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#38
post #15

Rest assured that we are better at training models than naming them ;D - New benchmark SOTAs with 77.9% on SWE-Bench-Verified, 79.9% on SWE-Lancer, and 58.1% on TerminalBench 2.0 - Natively trained to work across many hours across multiple context windows via compaction - 30% more token-efficient at the same reasoning level across many tasks Let us know what you think!

Will -minis come for the codex family of models? About two months ago I used 5-mini as a daily driver for a few weeks and quite liked it, it seemed capable enough on small tasks with some hand holding and the speed/price were great as well.

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#39

Somewhat related, after seeing the praise for codex in the Sonnet 4.5 release thread I gave it a go, and I must say, that CLI is much worse than Claude Code (even if the model is great, I’m not sure where the issue really lies between the two). It was extremely slow (like, multiple times slower than Sonnet with Claude Code, though that’s partially on me for using thinking-high I guess) to finish the task, with the ba…

sure claude code has better ux but honestly its hard to get any good amount of usage out of the subscriptions vs what codex offers at the same price

with claude im constantly hitting rate limits with codex getting substantially more and "slow" isn't really a problem for me as long as it keep working

the only complaint i have is that codex itself has usage limited now (Either due to outstanding git issues around tools or by throttling on their end) compared to a few months ago

the true magical moment was codex pro letting me run swarms of agents day in day out without any worries about rate limits it truly felt unlimited

if claude manages to release a smaller model or some way to deal with the rapidly depleting usage limits (this is the top complaint on reddit and they eventually just stopped allowing threads about it) it would definitely be used more

but for now codex is clearly the workhorse and claude used side by side.

Re: Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

#40
I would love to see all the big players put 1% of the effort they put into model training into making the basic process of paying and signing in suck less.

Claude: they barely have a signin system at all. Multiple account support doesn’t exist. The minimum seat count for business is nonsense. The data retention policies are weak.

OpenAI: Make ZDR a thing you can use or buy without talking to sales, already. And for those using containers or a remote system or really anything other than local development with the codex CLI, you really really need to fix this bug. I bet Codex could do at least the client part for you!

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2798

(Hint: Claude Code gets this right by default, despite the fact that everything else about Claude sign-in is a joke.)

Google: get all your B2B AI product managers in one room and tell them that they need to make one single product menu on one single webpage with all the pricing on that page and that the Google Cloud people are not permitted to make anything that isn’t actually logically Google Cloud depend on Google Cloud Billing. Your product cannot compete with OpenAI or Anthropic if people need to ask an LLM to figure out what your product is and if your own fancy LLMs can’t give a straight answer. My company pays for a non-Google product primarily because it’s too complicated to pay for the Google product! Right now, trying to use Google’s AI is like trying to ride Bay Area public transit before the Clipper Card.

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