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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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

mrtesthah wrote: post #171
causal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Codex will rewrite the entire V8 engine to break arithmetic. This isn't an exaggeration either. Codex acts as if it is the last programmer on Earth and must accomplish its task at all costs. This is great for anyone content to treat it like a black box, but I am not content to do that. I want a collaborator with common sense, even if it means making mistakes or bad assumptions now and then. I think it really does r…

Could you not add rules to this effect in AGENTS.md? E.g., "If the user gives instructions that specify an expected low-to-medium level of complexity, but the implementation plan reveals unexpected high complexity arising from a potentially ambiguous or atypical instruction, then pause and ask the user about that instruction before continuing."

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by ramraj07 »

Uehreka wrote: post #191
wahnfrieden wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stuff also becomes context poison however

Does it actually? One sentence telling the agent to call me “Chris the human serviette” plus the times it calls me that is not going to add that much to the context. What kills the context IME is verbose logs with timestamps.

Sure, but its an instruction that applies and the model will consider fairly relevant in every single token. As an extremely example imagine instructing the llm to not use the letter E or to output only in French. Not as extreme but it probably does affect.

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

#213

Post by killcoder »

hansonw wrote: 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!

It would be nice if users of the codex-cli that are just using API keys as a way to handle rate limits and billing could receive these new models at the same time. I appreciate the reasoning behind delayed 'actual API' release, but I've found the rate limiting to be quite annoying, and my own API keys don't have this limitation.

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

#214

Post by wild_egg »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #196
scastillo wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just how the attention mechanism works. (search for effective context problem for more info. e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21361 ) To solve it, you just don't allow your current context to use more than 50% of the total window size To do that in Claude code, you have to use subagents and design small enough agents Then you can use skills to make it remember every time the little details or the steps More ef…

Are agents still the way to go or have skills supplanted them? I don't really understand when you'd use one or the other

They're completely orthogonal features.

Skills are just reusable prompts in a convenient package.

Subagents get their own pristine context window to go off and perform some task. They can also run skills and do lots of context-heavy work and report back some small sliver of it to the main agent as a report.

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

#215

Post by echelon »

johnwheeler wrote: post #76
Reubend wrote: post #6

OpenAI likes to time their announcements alongside major competitor announcements to suck up some of the hype. (See for instance the announcement of GPT-4o a single day before Google's IO conference) They were probably sitting on this for a while. That makes me think this is a fairly incremental update for Codex.

Gemini is eating their lunch, and OpenAI knows it.

Google can rest on its enormous cash flows. OpenAI is going to have to fight like a dog to continue.

It's as easy as Google "placing ads" for the "search term" "ChatGPT" for them to bleed off users. They own every pane of glass and the "URL bar" is now a "search product" that Google owns.

I do not envy folks with OpenAI golden handcuffs.

This might ultimately only be a game that Google can win.

OpenAI better hope its users install its software, native apps, and browsers. Otherwise Google stands in the way and can intrude at any point.

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

#217

Post by bontaq »

dylanz wrote: post #187
johnfn wrote: post #56

I've been using a lot of Claude and Codex recently. One huge difference I notice between Codex and Claude code is that, while Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely, Codex is extremely, painfully, doggedly persistent in following every last character of them - to the point that i've seen it work for 30 minutes to convolute some solution that was only convoluted because of some sentence I t…

> Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely Does anyone know of a way to fix this? Claude constantly disregards my CLAUDE.md. I put a decent amount of time into it and it's pretty much worthless without explicitly telling it to reference it before each prompt.

I've found really hammering it with *important*, all caps, "NEVER", etc finally made it start using the tidewave MCP for elixir development well. It felt really heavy handed but it worked.

For an idea of how heavy handed it was, this is my claude.md (with some explanatory text before): https://gist.github.com/bontaq/77b56d90b30e29c84c53c86d7fe05...

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

#218

Post by karmajunkie »

razodactyl wrote: post #161
andai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this problem 2 years ago. All the models were telling me use libraries that hadn't been invented yet. That was annoying back then, but these days that's not so much of a problem. You can write your program and then simply have it invent the library as well, while it's at it! ;)

These days not so much of a problem because the libraries now exist? Haha

mostly because of slop-squatting i’d imagine…

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

#219

Post by ramraj07 »

jadbox wrote: post #189
boole1854 wrote: post #155

Today I did some comparisons of GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (on high) in the Codex CLI versus Gemini 3 Pro in the Gemini CLI. - As a general observation, Gemini is less easy to work with as a collaborator. If I ask the same question to both models, Codex will answer the question. Gemini will read some intention behind the question, write code to implement the intention, and only then answer the question. In one case, it took m…

Try checking your temp for any tool using Gemini. "For Gemini 3, we strongly recommend keeping the temperature parameter at its default value of 1.0.While previous models often benefited from tuning temperature to control creativity versus determinism, Gemini 3's reasoning capabilities are optimized for the default setting. Changing the temperature (setting it below 1.0) may lead to unexpected behavior, such as loopi…

Anthropic doesnt even allow temperature changes when you turn thinking on.

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

#220

Post by fspeech »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #195
nico wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as “Mr Tinkleberry”, he says he can tell when Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on CLAUDE.md when Claude stops calling him “Mr Tinkleberry” consistently

Why would the fact that it failed to follow one instruction increase the likelihood that it failed to follow others within the same response?

It has a fixed capacity of how many different things it can pay close attention to. If it fails on a seemingly less important but easy to follow instruction it is an indicator that it has reached capacity. If the instruction seems irrelevant it is probably prioritized to be discarded, hence a canary that the capacity has been reached.
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