A Codex prompt to stop over-engineered defensive fixes: smallest durable change
kevinkern · x · 2026-08-20
The author previously complained that Codex produces weird code if unsupervised — a flaky font check became 60 lines of defensive diagnostics instead of a 2-line fix.
His practice: afterwards, ask Codex how to prevent such issues in the future. It produced a reusable review prompt: have the model examine the task for avoidable loops caused by flaky tests, unstable tooling, race conditions, or overly rigid rules; identify root causes; and propose the smallest durable process/test/tooling/documentation changes — explicitly without adding retries, fallbacks, or unnecessary guardrails.
Related event: Developers complain AI coding tools generate overly defensive code(2 posts)→
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