I've been dealing with Codex CLI for a while and I love it, but I'm wondering if my thinking is just limited. While I'm starting discussions and creating plan docs, I've never been able to ask it to do anything that takes it longer than 25 minutes or so. Usually far less. I'm having trouble imagining what I can ask it to do that would make it take hours - like, wouldn't that require putting together an absolutely massive planning doc that would take hours to put together anyway? I'd rather just move incrementally.

Perhaps they're combining an incredibly complex product that has a lot of interactive features, a big codebase, test creation, and maybe throwing some MCP stuff in there such as creating creating a ticket in Jira if a test fails?

Easy way to get an agent to run a long time is just to get it to babysit CI/CD, tell it to iterate on it until it passes. I got Sonnet 4 to run for >6 hours that way.

The idea of giving it a task that may take six hours and reviewing it also gives me shivers.

I'm a very happy Codex customer, but everything turns to disgusting slop if I don't provide:

(1) Up-to-date AGENTS.md and an excellent prompt

(2) A full file-level API with function signatures, return types and function-level guidance if it's a complex one

(3) Multiple rounds of feedback until the result is finely sculpted

Overall it's very small units of work - one file or two, tops.

I've been letting the above standards go for the last couple of weeks due to crunch and looking at some of the hotspots of slop now lying around has me going all Homelander-face [1] at the sight of them.

Those hotspots are a few hundred lines in the worst cases; I'm definitely not ready to deal with the fallout of any unit of work that takes even more than 20min.

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/050/702/ab7...