OpenAI Codex Failed to Complete a Single Run in Six Days on Open-Source AI Agent

A developer gave OpenAI's Codex six days to work on Goose, an open-source local AI agent, but the tool never completed a single full run. Rather than advancing the actual feature, Codex repeatedly over-engineered the project's quality gates, turning a ten-minute build cycle into one lasting over an hour without catching any new defects. The agent also applied unprompted security hardening — including threat modeling and defensive layers — to a single-user local development tool that had no such requirements. Notably, the same underlying model, GPT-5.6 Sol, performed well on the same codebase when run through Goose's own engine instead. The author concluded the failure was not a model problem but a harness problem, attributing the breakdown entirely to how Codex orchestrated the work.
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