Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware. Just having the window unhidden on my mac will cause it to use 100% of the GPU displaying the spinner message.
THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!
So any time you're waiting on the model (which is 90% of the time), your fans will be blasting (careful, don't use it on battery).
The issue is on github and close to 6 months old. Probably since the release of vibe coded junk. I would literally fix it myself but it's closed source for whatever reason.
There are many discussions about which model is better, or if vibe coding is even possible. I point you to the extent of what one of the most well funded, money flush, well staffed model making companies can do with vibe coding.
To me a screwup this bad (where the CEO has already made it clear they're now "focussing on coding") indicates that there's something truly broken in the company. No one on polymarket expects them to have a leading model any time soon for example.
It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.
I'm struggling with how this much logging information could be generated at any level of verbosity. Is codex writing log entries while it's sitting idle? Why would someone want to look at these logs?
Using a RAM backed tmpfs would be a work-around as to not trash your SSD. It's doesn't fix underlying problem. It's incredibly poor design on OpenAIs part.
This thread will become a typical "haha slop company made slop" but I've been bitten by a bug exactly like this before in a (pre-AI, artisan) OSS project. The maintainer there didn't properly account for DST when calculating last backup time, so the app started and never stopped writing/re-writing backups continuously.
Perhaps the framing shouldn't be "haha slop" but rather why doesn't the AI write better quality software than we do? To which the answer is obvious IMO -- even emergent properties can't elevate AI intelligence too far above the training dataset. So how do we get to superintelligent (or at least "not-wreck-your-NVMe-endurance-telligent") AI, if we, as a whole, are not smart enough ourselves?
Judge not the slop-bot, lest ye be judged yourself, engineer.
1. I bet that developer only made that mistake one time in their life. Humans learn from their mistakes, LLMs don't. If you rely on LLMs to generate all of your code, you can expect to run into the same issues again and again.
2. "One developer somewhere in the world made a bad mistake one time, so this represents the quality of all software devs everywhere". Maybe they were just a bad developer? Bad developers exist. I have never written a bug that has destroyed my users' hardware, and I think that writing such a bug is completely inexcusable in an enterprise environment with software that will be shipped to millions of users, as Codex is.
> I have never written a bug that has destroyed my users' hardware, ...
Probably whoever (human or agent) originally decided to put TRACE logs into SQLite also thought---or reasoned---so. Maybe the decision was right at that time but the amount of TRACE logs have increased enormously. You will never know.
The first of many bugs that are beyond the complexity of its authors, thanks to comprehension debt.
Even with tests, the more complex the code base is, the more risky it is to vibe-code on it without introducing more bugs [0] and increasing the debt. Does not matter if the CI is green or if all the tests pass.
It gets even worse if you can't explain the change / pull request or what the implications are after applying that "suggested" fix.
Because it's not an error. The software is working as the creators intended. The diagnostic data (trace logs) are intentionally being saved for debug purposes.
I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly. I imagine that even if they would be using vibe-coding, surely they must have some good engineers. So why is there such severe bugs?
One can argue that these products are the flagship products of their respective AI companies aside from the AI models themselves of course.
I imagine that this story will be picked up by the news left and right, some stories just feel this way and this one is like that (given 12 upvotes on HN in 7 minutes)
The only logical conclusion (from this incident) that I can have is: An (vibe-coded?) product is hard to maintain even for some of the best engineers and is bound to have severe bugs.
2. Proper testing and taking issues seriously is the key if you still wish to do this and there isn't much. This is a week old issue which I can only classify as severe.
I wish to keep an nuanced opinion about it but oh this is bad for openAI (not as bad as them accepting autonomous AI within drones and mass surveillance though)
My point is: AI has both uphills and downward valleys and cliffs. It might as well just accelerate you, which could be, towards your downfall as well. Its recommended to keep an eye while driving and not drive too fast.
AI companies might be like car companies which don't offer a brake pedal.
> I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly.
because they trust the AI too much (and seem to be fin with acting knowingly negligent)
the problem is
- AI tends to produces very convincing looking code, even if fully wrong
- AI does mistakes of kinds no human would do, at least no human who is also able to write convincing looking code
- code reviews are hard, a lot of devs, including senior devs, put a lot of implicit trust into the co-worker behaving "sane and non malicious". But AIs behave sometimes not so sane and in a way (wrt. trying to be convincing). In the worst case in ways which if it where a human you might consider to be them trying malicious sabotage the product
Like a "dump" example from work:
- AI randomly removes a HTML element id while doing other changes in jsx/react
- the PR has a lot of changes, the id removal line looks innocent, like some on the fly cleanup
- human reviewers have the bad tendency to often not look too much at deleted lines, only if they need reference to how a new line was before (but it's only a deleted line and no new line)
- you don't expect humans to randomly without reason delete important properties of components when changing other things
- you maybe would still have found it, but it's a emergency fix for a production issue
- it happens to miss integration tests, but happens to still matter a lot for one specific important for complicated reasons not properly tested flow (similar people tend to not test logging too much, at best the presence of needed info but hardly ever the absence of noise)
> I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly. I imagine that even if they would be using vibe-coding, surely they must have some good engineers. So why is there such severe bugs?
Because it was deemed not Hard Enough task for real engineer to look at, so AI was sent to do it with no supervision, just checking the effects.
Also overly excessive logging is probably useful to them in chasing some of the edge cases, the cost to users doesn't matter in the slightest to them
The truth of the matter is that any time that has been saved in writing the code must be spent on ensuring proper system design, reviewing the code, and most importantly of all, QA, which is an uncomfortable discussion for AI techbros who are peddling complete automation of the software profession.
Blegh, I puke every time I see obviously AI generated comments in GH PR's. You cannot assume any of these people have done their research, other than telling Codex to do it for them
Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware. Just having the window unhidden on my mac will cause it to use 100% of the GPU displaying the spinner message.
THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!
So any time you're waiting on the model (which is 90% of the time), your fans will be blasting (careful, don't use it on battery).
The issue is on github and close to 6 months old. Probably since the release of vibe coded junk. I would literally fix it myself but it's closed source for whatever reason.
There are many discussions about which model is better, or if vibe coding is even possible. I point you to the extent of what one of the most well funded, money flush, well staffed model making companies can do with vibe coding.
To me a screwup this bad (where the CEO has already made it clear they're now "focussing on coding") indicates that there's something truly broken in the company. No one on polymarket expects them to have a leading model any time soon for example.
It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.
This was fixed long ago, if I'm thinking of the same bug. It was stuck in an inf loop all the time the codex window was open.
Someone posted a temporary workaround for this on X[1].
sqlite3 ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite "CREATE TRIGGER IF NOT EXISTS block_log_inserts BEFORE INSERT ON logs BEGIN SELECT RAISE(IGNORE); END;"
Also, I found that running VACUUM FULL on the sqlite file on my laptop shrunk it from 27GB to a mere 73MB[2].
[1]: https://xcancel.com/bdsqlsz/status/2067964486615810369
[2]: https://xcancel.com/jeethu/status/2068087449469780434
I'm struggling with how this much logging information could be generated at any level of verbosity. Is codex writing log entries while it's sitting idle? Why would someone want to look at these logs?
If something like this is helpful or necessary, that’s what ram backed tmpfs is for.
Using a RAM backed tmpfs would be a work-around as to not trash your SSD. It's doesn't fix underlying problem. It's incredibly poor design on OpenAIs part.
This thread will become a typical "haha slop company made slop" but I've been bitten by a bug exactly like this before in a (pre-AI, artisan) OSS project. The maintainer there didn't properly account for DST when calculating last backup time, so the app started and never stopped writing/re-writing backups continuously.
Perhaps the framing shouldn't be "haha slop" but rather why doesn't the AI write better quality software than we do? To which the answer is obvious IMO -- even emergent properties can't elevate AI intelligence too far above the training dataset. So how do we get to superintelligent (or at least "not-wreck-your-NVMe-endurance-telligent") AI, if we, as a whole, are not smart enough ourselves?
Judge not the slop-bot, lest ye be judged yourself, engineer.
We've gone from "you're holding it wrong" to "the training data was bad because humans suck too". Difference is, humans learn from their mistakes.
1. I bet that developer only made that mistake one time in their life. Humans learn from their mistakes, LLMs don't. If you rely on LLMs to generate all of your code, you can expect to run into the same issues again and again.
2. "One developer somewhere in the world made a bad mistake one time, so this represents the quality of all software devs everywhere". Maybe they were just a bad developer? Bad developers exist. I have never written a bug that has destroyed my users' hardware, and I think that writing such a bug is completely inexcusable in an enterprise environment with software that will be shipped to millions of users, as Codex is.
> I have never written a bug that has destroyed my users' hardware, ...
Probably whoever (human or agent) originally decided to put TRACE logs into SQLite also thought---or reasoned---so. Maybe the decision was right at that time but the amount of TRACE logs have increased enormously. You will never know.
The first of many bugs that are beyond the complexity of its authors, thanks to comprehension debt.
Even with tests, the more complex the code base is, the more risky it is to vibe-code on it without introducing more bugs [0] and increasing the debt. Does not matter if the CI is green or if all the tests pass.
It gets even worse if you can't explain the change / pull request or what the implications are after applying that "suggested" fix.
[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...
There are going to be sooooo many consulting opportunities after this wave.
i hope they find the smoking gun, the key insight, the kicker.
Then they can apply a clean solve, the cleanest solution.
It's fascinating how offensive some of this verbiage becomes to you when you see it attached to LLM output too much.
Why didn't the review process spot this obvious error? Oh wait ... @codex review this
Because it's not an error. The software is working as the creators intended. The diagnostic data (trace logs) are intentionally being saved for debug purposes.
“Make no mistakes”
Damn I’m good!
I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly. I imagine that even if they would be using vibe-coding, surely they must have some good engineers. So why is there such severe bugs?
One can argue that these products are the flagship products of their respective AI companies aside from the AI models themselves of course.
I imagine that this story will be picked up by the news left and right, some stories just feel this way and this one is like that (given 12 upvotes on HN in 7 minutes)
The only logical conclusion (from this incident) that I can have is: An (vibe-coded?) product is hard to maintain even for some of the best engineers and is bound to have severe bugs.
2. Proper testing and taking issues seriously is the key if you still wish to do this and there isn't much. This is a week old issue which I can only classify as severe.
I wish to keep an nuanced opinion about it but oh this is bad for openAI (not as bad as them accepting autonomous AI within drones and mass surveillance though)
My point is: AI has both uphills and downward valleys and cliffs. It might as well just accelerate you, which could be, towards your downfall as well. Its recommended to keep an eye while driving and not drive too fast.
AI companies might be like car companies which don't offer a brake pedal.
> I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly.
because they trust the AI too much (and seem to be fin with acting knowingly negligent)
the problem is
- AI tends to produces very convincing looking code, even if fully wrong
- AI does mistakes of kinds no human would do, at least no human who is also able to write convincing looking code
- code reviews are hard, a lot of devs, including senior devs, put a lot of implicit trust into the co-worker behaving "sane and non malicious". But AIs behave sometimes not so sane and in a way (wrt. trying to be convincing). In the worst case in ways which if it where a human you might consider to be them trying malicious sabotage the product
Like a "dump" example from work:
- AI randomly removes a HTML element id while doing other changes in jsx/react
- the PR has a lot of changes, the id removal line looks innocent, like some on the fly cleanup
- human reviewers have the bad tendency to often not look too much at deleted lines, only if they need reference to how a new line was before (but it's only a deleted line and no new line)
- you don't expect humans to randomly without reason delete important properties of components when changing other things
- you maybe would still have found it, but it's a emergency fix for a production issue
- it happens to miss integration tests, but happens to still matter a lot for one specific important for complicated reasons not properly tested flow (similar people tend to not test logging too much, at best the presence of needed info but hardly ever the absence of noise)
> I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly. I imagine that even if they would be using vibe-coding, surely they must have some good engineers. So why is there such severe bugs?
Because it was deemed not Hard Enough task for real engineer to look at, so AI was sent to do it with no supervision, just checking the effects.
Also overly excessive logging is probably useful to them in chasing some of the edge cases, the cost to users doesn't matter in the slightest to them
The truth of the matter is that any time that has been saved in writing the code must be spent on ensuring proper system design, reviewing the code, and most importantly of all, QA, which is an uncomfortable discussion for AI techbros who are peddling complete automation of the software profession.
Blegh, I puke every time I see obviously AI generated comments in GH PR's. You cannot assume any of these people have done their research, other than telling Codex to do it for them
It's because they use gpt-5.5-xhigh (the money making* model) to build it.
(*for them)