For new and not-so-new codex users

[u/Character_Novel_2592]

i’ve been testing codex pretty hard on real production projects these last few days and i think people should be careful with what is actually running behind these agents

i have internal logs/traces from last week showing that luna and luna reserve sessions were actually resolving to gpt-5 codex mini

in my case this is not a guess, i have the evidence from my own sessions

and honestly this explains a lot

during the same period i saw sol:

• mix staging and production even with explicit rules
• run smoke/test stuff against production
• introduce bugs into code that was already working
• get stuck in polling/wait loops that basically burned my whole available quota
• make mistakes bad enough that i ended up using grok 4.6 to repair part of the work

so maybe saying “sol is nerfed” is not even the full problem

the weird part is that my experience with the api is excellent

most of these problems show up when the model is running through the codex harness with routing, context management, tools, subagents, automatic continuations, loops etc

and i’m obviously not the only one seeing this. people have been reporting degradation and apparent routing to smaller models on the codex github for months and there still isnt a clear explanation of what is actually happening

this is especially important for newer users because they might select one model and never realize a smaller one is handling part of the work

an experienced dev will probably notice when the quality suddenly drops

a new user probably wont. they will just trust the agent, accept the changes and burn quota at the same time

today sol is actually behaving really well again and im using sol + grok 4.6 together on a serious project, so im not saying sol itself is a bad model

my point is simpler:

the model you select and the model actually doing the work inside the agent harness may not always be the same thing

and that could explain both the “nerfed” feeling and part of the crazy quota drain people keep reporting

if you use codex for serious work, watch the diffs, watch your traces, watch your quota and dont blindly trust the model label

[u/4ty-2]

"run smoke/test stuff against production"

the very fact that the agent can execute against production is the critical issue here, this should never be allowed.

[u/Character_Novel_2592 → u/4ty-2]

prod access was intentional and scoped. the problem is that the agent ignored explicit environment rules and used the wrong staging config against prod.

[u/bedla]

And your internal logs/traces shows the actual prompt routed to different model?

Because if your based that just on count of usages, it will be mixed with memories management and auto mode, which both uses codex mini model.

I am not trying to argue, this can be some weird A/B experiment or something, but I have not seen this. Just few days ago I was running mitm proxy to diagnose unrelated issue with codex and there is not a single mini in that dump (I have memories disabled and not using auto mode)

[u/Character_Novel_2592 → u/bedla]

no, this wasnt inferred from usage counts. the trace showed the actual request being routed to codex mini. memory and auto mode are unrelated to what im referring to.