User says GPT 5.6 over-plans, invents tests, and burns tokens in coding work
maxcameradenali · reddit · 2026-07-21
A Reddit user says GPT 5.6 became hard to use for coding because it kept inventing tests, over-planning, and chasing rabbit holes.
- The complaint is not about raw capability, but about workflow behavior: too much procedural overhead, unnecessary smoke tests, and token waste.
- The user ended up signing up for Claude just to make Codex “shut up” and stick to the basics.
- The post is a concrete example of a common agentic-coding failure mode: the model keeps optimizing the process instead of finishing the task.
More from coding & agent
- Codex tip: use Sol with Astra and Luna sub-agents to save usage — pvncher · 2026-09-11
- agents-best-practices: a provider-neutral Agent Skill for designing and auditing agentic harnesses — tom_doerr · 2026-09-11
- Cognition's SWE-2 uses a KKT duality argument in RL to shift the effort Pareto curve — YouJiacheng · 2026-09-11
- First-ever Three.js Conference lands in Paris, with a panel on AI-shortened design workflows — OdinLovis · 2026-09-11
- Data engineering, not agent frameworks, is the real bottleneck for enterprise AI agents — dhruv2038 · 2026-09-11
- RTK Terminal Compression Cuts Tokens but Leaves Your AI Coding Bill Unchanged — Bartaseth · 2026-09-11