I too tried Codex and found it similarly hard to control over long contexts. It ended up coding an app that spit out millions of tiny files which were technically smaller than the original files it was supposed to optimize, except due to there being millions of them, actual hard drive usage was 18x larger. It seemed to work well until a certain point, and I suspect that point was context window overflow / compaction. Happy to provide you with the full session if it helps.
I’ll give Codex another shot with 1M. It just seemed like cperciva’s case and my own might be similar in that once the context window overflows (or refuses to fill) Codex seems to lose something essential, whereas Claude keeps it. What that thing is, I have no idea, but I’m hoping longer context will preserve it.
Yeah, I would definitely characterize it as an instruction following problem. After a few more round trips I got it to admit that "my earlier passes leaned heavily on build/tests + targeted reads, which can miss many “deep” bugs that only show up under specific conditions or with careful semantic review" and then asking it to "Please do a careful semantic review of files, one by one." started it on actually reviewing code.
Mind you, the bugs it reported were mostly bogus. But at least I was eventually able to convince it to try.
It occurred to me that searching 196 .c files was a context window issue, but maybe there’s something else going on. Either way, Codex could behave better.
Haha. This was the second time in like a year that I’ve posted a Twitter link, and the second time someone complained. Okay, I’ll try to remove those before posting, and I’ll edit this one out.
Feels like a losing battle, but hey, the audience is usually right.
I'm sorry, but it's my pet peeve. If you're on iOS/macOS I built a 100% free and privacy-friendly app to get rid of tracking parameters from hundreds of different websites, not just X/Twitter.
This is great! I have been meaning to implement this sort of thing in my existing Shortcuts flow but I see you already support it in Shortcuts! Thank you for this!
So what is your motivation for doing this, incidentally? Can you be explicit about it? I am genuinely curious.
Especially when it’s to the point of, you know, nagging/policing people to do it the way you’d prefer, when you could just redirect your router requests from x.com to xcancel.com
It's not particularly about x.com, hundreds of site like x, youtube, facebook, linkedin, tiktok etc surreptitious add tracking parameters to their links. The iOS Messages app even hides these tracking parameters. I don't like being surreptitiously tracked online and judging by the success of my free app, there are millions of people like me.
so, since these companies have to comply with removing PII, is the worst thing that could happen to me, that I get ads that are more likely to be interesting to me?
i’m not being facetious, honest question, especially considering ads are the only thing paying these people these days
Who has to comply with removing PII? Your profile, yours, mapped to a special snowflake ID, is packaged and sold across a network of 2500 - 4000 buyers, including in particular those that clean, tie (a surprisingly small footprint turns into its own "natural primary key"), qualify, and sell on to agencies. No step in this is illegal.
my first and last name is already a "natural primary key" (every single google result of Peter Marreck is me), so I've already had to give that up a long time ago. So nothing new is lost I guess?
The more data they have on you, the more valuable that data is to a third party. So they sell your data to someone else, who then phones you based on your known deep interest in <whatever it was that tracked you>. Or spams you. Or messages you. Or whatever method they think will most get your attention.
If you don't give them that information, they can't sell it, and the buyers won't annoy you.
It's not that the ads you get are more interesting, it's that you get more ads because they think they know more about you.
The worst thing that could happen is that you get caught in some government dragnet based on your historical viewing data and get disappeared because (as is the nature of dragnet searches) no matter how innocent you are you still look guilty.
Helpful type of nagging for me. Most here would agree they are not a positive aspect of the modern digital experience, calling it out gently without hostility is not bad. It might not be quite self policing but some of that with good reason is not bad for healthy communities IMO.
I too tried Codex and found it similarly hard to control over long contexts. It ended up coding an app that spit out millions of tiny files which were technically smaller than the original files it was supposed to optimize, except due to there being millions of them, actual hard drive usage was 18x larger. It seemed to work well until a certain point, and I suspect that point was context window overflow / compaction. Happy to provide you with the full session if it helps.
I’ll give Codex another shot with 1M. It just seemed like cperciva’s case and my own might be similar in that once the context window overflows (or refuses to fill) Codex seems to lose something essential, whereas Claude keeps it. What that thing is, I have no idea, but I’m hoping longer context will preserve it.