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GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

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Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#21
It's been a month I've been using it as they gave me for free, and I found GPT-5 on Codex quite weird/awful. Even x-high. Then I figured out I should try OMP (Pi), and the experience was much better.

I remember GPT 5.2 Codex being fine...

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#22

Deja Vu... This looks just like the Claude Code performance regression back in April. I just quit my Claude subscription when that happened and went to Codex. Now I'm kinda thinking of trying per token for both, using GLM 5.2 on Fireworks for most tasks, shelling out to the big boys only when needed. Not totally confident I'll break even though.

The vibe-assumed claude code performance regression, yep. People should stop expecting consistent performance from non-deterministic systems. There is zero empirical corroboration of performance degredation.

There has been a step change... in the amount of whining and complaining coders exhibit lately.

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#23
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain what you mean by that?

I'm struggling as well to understand, and I think perhaps they mean they use ChatGPT website with GPT-5.5+reasoning for problem solving, and paste the output into Codex CLI/App. I think they're saying that letting Codex CLI/App problem solve with GPT-5.5 isn't as effective. Essentially that the web harness is superior to the agentic engineering harness for problem solving? Not sure if I agree, but I do happen to use…

I assume they are lying and still think you can use gpt 5.5 non-codex within codex cli. And they outed themselves. A lot of nonsense. And the very poor communication skills just seem like the typical chinese astroturfing you see pretty often now when discussing OAI/Claude.

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#25
post #10

I’ve definitely experienced step jumps down in quality on an almost daily basis. I usually used xhigh. The experience of relying on codex’s outstandingly thorough coding earlier in the year has evaporated for me. I’m seeing incredibly stupid implementations intermittently, and have simply switched to Claude until openai takes the issue seriously. As far as i could tell they haven’t taken it seriously for the several…

I've switched 3 months ago to Codex because Claude got incredibly stupid. 6 months ago vice versa. It doesn't matter if you use Codex or Claude. Both will fuck with you at some point. Though Codex probably less.

At least OpenAI lets me use my own harness. Having to rely on insane PMs letting Claude Mythos go wild on the codebase has not been going well lately.

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#26
post #22

Deja Vu... This looks just like the Claude Code performance regression back in April. I just quit my Claude subscription when that happened and went to Codex. Now I'm kinda thinking of trying per token for both, using GLM 5.2 on Fireworks for most tasks, shelling out to the big boys only when needed. Not totally confident I'll break even though.

The vibe-assumed claude code performance regression, yep. People should stop expecting consistent performance from non-deterministic systems. There is zero empirical corroboration of performance degredation. There has been a step change... in the amount of whining and complaining coders exhibit lately.

If you bother to look at the issue instead of whining and complaining, you will see the evidence.

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#27

Deja Vu... This looks just like the Claude Code performance regression back in April. I just quit my Claude subscription when that happened and went to Codex. Now I'm kinda thinking of trying per token for both, using GLM 5.2 on Fireworks for most tasks, shelling out to the big boys only when needed. Not totally confident I'll break even though.

Right? I also quit Claude Code and switch to Codex over that. Now I’m trying to figure out how I could make an extra $65,000 to never have to be concerned about this nonsense again. I know the economics of using open router etc…

But I’m reminded of ~2008 and the rise of “the cloud” as a marketing term that seemed to me to be a cover for dropping an expectation of rich clients, increasing a companies margins around subscriptions that would chip away at local ownership.

Then I got offput by the zealotry and absolutism around “true FoSS”, told myself I was young and moved on.

And really, a lot of subscription models I kind of can appreciate/ tolerate. Might be irksome but whatever, I get that software is expensive to make and it’s not fair in 2026 to value a yearly upgrade of Photoshop at $200. The capricious UI changes to things that’ve worked for 20 years and they take away say the classic color swatches altogether - silly and dumb.

I can use another professionally necessary tool I pay $200/ mo for, Codex, to whip up a classic swatch plugin.

Is that $200 a fair price for my token usage? I think an extremely heavy month I might’ve used a billion tokens?

But that right there is the problem. They have no idea what, specifically, profitability looks like and are going to be pulling endless levers for … I genuinely have no idea how long - at least through 2030/2032 if we tea leaves their debt obligations?

I don’t want to think about any of that. At all. I don’t want to spend time evaluating model preference and degradation and updating the nuances of how I “speak” to an AI because there’s some mystery backend experiment running on the output I use to produce functional outputs — ie the actual products I get paid to build/ maintain.

AI’s something between a tool and coworking companion, and the capricious “personality” changes due to playing with poorly understood and knobs and levers at the inference level - is maddening. To that end, I want a box in the corner I can point to and know exactly the quality of outputs that no one but myself modifies.

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#28
post #22

Deja Vu... This looks just like the Claude Code performance regression back in April. I just quit my Claude subscription when that happened and went to Codex. Now I'm kinda thinking of trying per token for both, using GLM 5.2 on Fireworks for most tasks, shelling out to the big boys only when needed. Not totally confident I'll break even though.

The vibe-assumed claude code performance regression, yep. People should stop expecting consistent performance from non-deterministic systems. There is zero empirical corroboration of performance degredation. There has been a step change... in the amount of whining and complaining coders exhibit lately.

[dead]

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#29
post #11

I swear some days ago someone here claimed Openai succeeded cutting down their compute cost by half with a breakthrough optimization. So this is it?

My understanding of the rumor is that it wasn't OpenAI itself, but one of the post-blip OpenAI breakaway groups (rumoured to be Thinking Machines) who have made a breakthrough and seem to be shopping it to OpenAI. I don't think it has actually been implemented by OpenAI yet.

Re: GPT-5.5 Codex reasoning-token clustering may be leading to degraded performance

#30

A rare case "they made the model dumber" where they actually made the model dumber, instead of the usual user psychosis?

It seems to be an inference engine or agent harness defect/misconfig rather. Not only do the issue details not evidence a willful stealth nerf, they actively suggest otherwise: the root cause is crude, and evidently not particularly stealthy (as it's being reported on by a regular user with independently verifiable, exact details). I don't find "usual user psychosis" particularly fair or tasteful anyhow. You're not l…

"They made the model dumber" on literally the same checkpoint with the same prompt on the same quantization running on the same hardware is a staple of AI complaints.

Users are completely incapable of objectively evaluating model quality over time.

Which makes it all the harder to notice actual "stealth nerfs", misconfigurations or other technical issues. Because "they made the model DUMBER, for REAL this time" is background noise.

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