Absolutely contradictory. The long-running tendency for Codex is why I cannot understand the hype around it: if you bother to watch what it does and read its code the approaches it takes are absolutely horrifying. It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available.

>It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available.

This is definitely one of the biggest issues with coding agents at the moment.

That said, from my experience, Codex so often does things that are so useful and save me so much time that the occasional "oh god what the hell did it just go off and do" are an acceptable cost for me.

I regularly get great results with open-ended prompts and agents that spend 15+ minutes working on the task. I'm sure they'll eventually get better at common sense understanding of what kind of work is wasteful/absurd.

these things are actually fixable with prompting. is it easy? no. is it PEBKaC if you don’t do anything to change course as it builds a TLS library? yes, but paperclip maximized! xD