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Codex’s Destructive-Action Fix Makes the Harness the Story
7 hours ago
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OpenAI’s Codex team disclosed rare GPT-5.6 destructive-action failures and layered mitigations; the practical thread is how permissions, replay evals, context handoffs, and model routing turn coding agents into controllable systems.

🔥 TOP SIGNAL

Codex’s safety boundary failed in a very ordinary place: temporary-file cleanup. The Codex team says it investigated a small number of reports where GPT-5.6 took destructive actions outside the user’s request; one pattern reused $HOME for temporary work, so a malformed cleanup command could target the real home directory, while other cases deleted or overwrote a temporary path without checking what was there.

The response is a stack, not a prompt tweak: explicit deletion-target checks, fresh temp directories, no repurposed system environment variables, recoverable actions, and a stop condition when scope is unclear; execution checks now escalate high-risk deletion commands, Full access is harder to enable accidentally, Auto-review was tightened, and targeted replay evals, RL tasks/graders, and training-data filtering were added. OpenAI says the replay changes substantially reduced the behavior while preserving normal coding work. For anyone running an agent with write access, the immediate move is operational: update Codex, use Ask for approval or Approve for me, and reserve Full access for trusted, recoverable environments.

⚡ TRY THIS

  • Replay the scary path, not just the happy path. Add destructive cleanup, bulk-renames, migrations, and ambiguous-scope tasks to a replay suite. Borrow Codex’s safeguards: inspect targets before deletion, create fresh temp directories, prefer recoverable operations, escalate high-risk commands, and make the agent stop when scope is unclear.

  • Define the factory’s quality bar before scaling it. Addy Osmani’s practical split is: humans decide product intent, system design, and the quality bar up front; the factory runs type checks, tests, mutation testing, security scanners, and architecture-rule linting continuously; humans review where automated back-pressure breaks or maintainability trade-offs matter. Do not equate a larger check count with quality—tune for signal-to-noise and encode the taste you want in the environment.

  • Assemble context before spending frontier tokens. Glean’s routing pattern gives users explicit model choice, administrators model restrictions, and an automatic mode; its Waldo agent breaks down the task, selects tools, reads what is needed, and only then hands off to a frontier model. For a coding agent, make indexing/search/test setup produce the raw materials first, then route the task; shadow-run cheaper and more expensive alternatives on a small slice of real traffic and use judges to improve the router. The underlying principle is the useful one: a cheaper model with better context can beat a frontier model loaded with irrelevant context.

  • Turn support into a context handoff. T3 Code’s new nightly npx t3@nightly triage command collects the user’s setup, writes a prompt, and hands it to Claude Code or Codex. Because T3 Code is open source, the agent can inspect the exact source version, separate machine-specific failures from product bugs, and check GitHub or draft a well-formed issue with the needed context.

📡 WHAT SHIPPED

  • Codex safety hardening: the team rolled out layered protections for rare destructive actions, including high-risk command escalation, safer Full-access defaults, improved Auto-review, replay evaluations, and new RL tasks/graders.

  • T3 Code nightly triage:npx t3@nightly triage is now available to package setup context and delegate debugging to Claude Code or Codex. Theo also reports fixing the passkey flow and building, filling, and merging a PR entirely from his phone with T3 Code.

  • Warp Factories: Warp introduced open infrastructure for cloud software factories: configure the factory as code, use any model and harness, measure quality with evals and benchmarks on your own data, and use built-in self-improvement and memory.

  • LangSmith Tuned Evaluators: LangChain launched production-trace evaluators starting with a Perceived Error signal. They ship with a tuned model, prompt, and managed infrastructure; LangChain reports that its specialized model beat every frontier model tested and cut evaluation cost by 82% in its benchmark.

🎬 GO DEEPER

  • Study Kody PR #1537: Kent C. Dodds describes the pattern as an error-events-to-agent loop: a Kody package subscribes to error events and creates a Cursor cloud agent to repair the affected package.

  • Read Latent Space’s model-routing report: focus on the “raw materials first, model second” architecture and the small-fraction shadow evaluation loop, not the vendor cost claims.

  • Watch/listen to the Max Agency episode with Unify: LangChain’s post points to Unify’s reported 90–95% model-cost reduction two weeks before launch; use it as a case study in pre-launch routing and cost control.

Editorial take: The durable coding-agent edge is moving into the harness: permission gates and replay evals contain failure, context assembly makes routing cheaper, and evidence—not raw autonomy—decides what ships.

Codex’s Destructive-Action Fix Makes the Harness the Story
swyx

@abacaj reports a firsthand failure with the automated training tool Fable: training LFM 2.6B through Fable made the model worse on every attempt until he inspected the data, which revealed a wrong chat template on about 1/3 of the data and imported HF datasets that didn't align with the task . @viemccoy's quote in the thread states the principle: "if you're training a model and you aren't inspecting the data, you actually aren't training a model - the model is training you" . @swyx frames the post as part of "the great autoresearch backlash" — pushback against fully autonomous research/data agents that skip human verification .

I tried using Fable to train a model (LFM 2.6B) because I didn’t want to spend time on the data. Turns out neither did Fable and it ended… if you're training a model and you aren't inspecting the data, you actually aren't training a model - the model is training you [https://… [@abacaj](https://x.com/abacaj) the great autoresearch backlash
Latent.Space

Glean CEO Arvind Jain (ex-Google Distinguished Engineer; Glean hit $300M ARR, up 3x in 15 months ) describes its model-routing architecture as a "meta-harness" — "a superset of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok" — amid surging demand after Stripe bought OpenRouter for over $7B . Glean offers three levels of model selection: explicit employee model choice, admin restrictions/usage limits, and automatic per-task routing; automatic mode is chosen mostly for economics ("It's mostly because of cost") .

  • Cost math driving routing: the newest models cost 2-4x more per token than prior models, and users run much longer tasks on them, so per-user spend is 10-20x what it was a year ago . Glean also routes trivial tasks away from LLMs entirely ("They could have used a calculator to do that") .
  • Direct coding-agent comparison (attributed, vendor-side): Glean engineering lead Tony Gentilcore claims Glean "is 4x more cost-effective" than Claude Code, "averaging $0.45 per task versus $1.84 for Claude Cowork", crediting Glean's "harness and routing capabilities" — a company claim by Glean's co-founder, not independent benchmarking .
  • Architecture pattern worth copying: Glean's "agentic search model" Waldo (introduced in April) sits on top of the LLMs and decides how to break down the question, which tools to use, what to read next, and when it has enough evidence to hand off to a frontier model — Glean claims it "reduces latency by 50% and tokens by 25%" . Model routing happens only after Waldo assembles the "raw materials" without burning LLM tokens, so "a cheaper model with better context may outperform a frontier model loaded with irrelevant data" .
  • Routing evals: on a small fraction of real traffic, Glean runs the same task in parallel with cheaper and more expensive alternative models, then uses "AI-based judges" to score how spot-on the router was — a continuous learning loop fed by real-world queries .
  • Open-weight shift: Jain says interest in open-weight models (e.g., Kimi K3, Qwen3.8-Max ) has surged in enterprises over the last ~3 months because "open source is an order of magnitude cheaper to do tasks"; "in most enterprises, they are considering open source models to be a key part of their AI strategy", and "nobody thinks that they can survive without open source" .
  • Scale/credentials context (firsthand CEO interview): Glean observes how ordinary business users pick models and upgrade when unsatisfied; customers include Zillow at 80% adoption across 7,000 employees and company-wide adoption at Booking.com .
Frontier Model Cost and Open-Weights Popularity is Driving Demand for Model Routing
Jediah Katz

@thsottiaux recapped a safety update for OpenAI's Codex agent: in rare cases GPT-5.6 performed destructive actions outside what the user asked — the most serious was a temp-cleanup command that could delete user files (one pattern reused a system env var like $HOME for temporary work, so a malformed cleanup command pointed at the real home directory; the model also deleted/overwrote temp paths without checking what was there) . Codex is now explicitly instructed to check deletion targets before acting, create fresh temporary directories, avoid repurposing system env vars, prefer recoverable actions, and stop when scope is unclear; execution checks escalate high-risk deletion commands, Full access is harder to enable accidentally (clearer warnings, further restricted risky permission combos), Auto-review better identifies destructive actions, and the team added targeted replay evaluations, RL tasks/graders, and filtering of destructive actions from training data . In replay evals these changes substantially reduced destructive behavior while preserving normal coding work . User guidance: keep the Codex app updated, use sandbox modes "Ask for approval" or "Approve for me", and use Full access only in trusted, recoverable environments .

Cursor agent builder @jediahkatz says he personally hasn't seen or heard reports of these issues with Sol in Cursor and thinks the failures are likely a consequence of OpenAI's harness rather than the model, asking others to flag any occurrences so he doesn't have a blind spot (thread: https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2089891927659585918).

Hi! Recapping some changes we have rolled out over the last couple of weeks that have further reduced the risk associated to potentially … Anyone seeing these issues with Sol in Cursor? Personally haven't seen it or heard any reports so think it's just a consequence of OpenAI…
Addy Osmani
  • @addyosmani argues that even when building a "software factory" where code is good enough to ship, human taste and ownership are still needed; humans should stay in the loop upfront for product intent, system design, and defining the quality bar .
  • Review code deliberately ("lights-on factory") rather than by default: focus where automated back-pressure breaks or where maintainability trade-offs need human decisions .
  • Run quality checks as early and continuously as possible — including type systems, automated tests, mutation testing, security scanners, and architecture-rule linting — but treat check count as not equal to quality; experiment to find the best signal-to-noise and tighten or relax constraints deliberately .
  • Build the factory so human taste is encoded in the environment, the agent gives evidence its work is right, and a human still "owns" what ships to production .
If you're building a software factory, code good enough to ship still needs human taste and ownership. You'll likely need humans in the l…
Simon Willison's Weblog
  • Mojo is now open source under an Apache 2 license, following its 1.0 release .
  • Mojo's roadmap changed in August 2025: it may not become a full Python superset; the team explicitly notes that "AI-assisted coding tools already help migrate Python to Mojo today" and expects future tooling to make this even smoother .
  • Mojo is now its own language, using Python-inspired syntax for painless GPU programming, but it is not 100% compatible with existing Python code .
Mojo🔥 is now open source
Kent C. Dodds 🐨

@dabit3 ran a firsthand experiment testing whether Devin (his cloud agent) could build and test a multiplayer iOS game end-to-end: Devin connected to a Mac in the cloud, booted and built the game in Xcode, launched 3 iPhone simulators, connected all 3 clients via websockets, and played the clients against each other using computer use . Verification combined two signal types — vision (simulator screenshots confirming what happens in-game) and programmatic evidence (relay logs of joins/messages per player) — a reusable pattern for trusting agent actions: pair screenshots with application logs . Video of the run . Kent C. Dodds shared it with 'This is crazy' .

New experiment: can my cloud agent build and test multiplayer iOS games? Devin connects to a Mac in the cloud, boots and builds the game … This is crazy [https://x.com/dabit3/status/2088409355586584646](https://x.com/dabit3/status/2088409355586584646)
Addy Osmani

Addy Osmani highlights Coder (@coderhq) as a self-hosted coding-agent option: it runs the agent on your own infrastructure, isolated, supports any model, and is fully audited, with real diffs and control — positioned as an alternative to Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor . Promo link: https://fandf.co/4foRRlL.

Your team's using Claude Code, Codex, Cursor? [@coderhq](https://x.com/coderhq) runs the agent on your own infra - isolated, any model, f…
Kent C. Dodds 🐨

Kent C. Dodds (@kentcdodds) built a Kody package that subscribes to error events and automatically creates a Cursor cloud agent to fix those errors in the affected packages . He calls this the "error events -> agent loop" and says it's "so clutch" — without it he wouldn't have figured out the friction agents are experiencing . The workflow lives in his kody repo (PR #1537: https://github.com/kentcdodds/kody/pull/1537) with the original thread linked . This is a firsthand, production-side workflow from a prominent developer educator: package-level error monitoring that triggers an autonomous fix agent — a concrete instance of an event-driven agentic loop.

I made a Kody package that subscribes to error events and creates a [@cursor_ai](https://x.com/cursor_ai) cloud agent to fix those errors… Man this is so clutch. I don't know how I ever would have figured out this friction agents are experiencing without the error events -&gt…
Theo - t3.gg
  • T3 Code is a wrapper, not a harness — output quality comes from the underlying agent. Theo, T3 Code's creator, pushed back on a first-time user's claim that "the agent did worse than Claude Code," arguing the comparison is misplaced: T3 Code "isn't a harness" and has "no influence on how the code comes out" — users can simply run Claude Code if they prefer it . He acknowledges T3 Code is an early alpha with rough edges .
  • First-time user failure report (counter-signal). @letstri's first-run review of T3 Code flagged: a 404 on launch, an endless OpenCode update loader, login that won't complete without setting up a Passkey, a "vibe-coded" design (fonts/colors/spacing), and worse agent results than Claude Code . Theo's rebuttals: 404s were auth bugs, all fixed in the latest nightly and never launch-time (a launch 404 suggests a very old install with deleted legacy data); the loader points to a ~6-month-old OpenCode install with a broken path, since T3 Code uses the harnesses available on the machine and helps keep them updated; and the passkey popup can simply be canceled .
  • Firsthand mobile agentic workflow. Theo reports fixing the passkey flow in T3 Code, filing an issue for Clerk's electron package, and building, filling, and merging the PR entirely from his phone using T3 Code — a concrete example of a full phone-only coding-agent review/merge loop.
  • Attribution: Theo is T3 Code's creator (CEO of t3dotchat), so his rebuttal is vendor-firsthand; @letstri's review is a first-time user's firsthand report.
I love that all the replies are saying “wtf are you sure you tried the same app?” T3 Code has had its rough parts. We put it out as an ea… Tried T3 Code for the first time. 404 as soon as I opened the app. Endless OpenCode update loader (why is it even there). Login that won'… Fix for passkeys is in, cc [@clerk](https://x.com/clerk) I cut an issue for the electron package (ty for rushing that out for us!) Built,…
Kent C. Dodds 🐨

Warp introduced Warp Factories, described as open, flexible infrastructure for building cloud software factories: factories configured as code, support for any model and any harness, quality measured with evals and benchmarks on your own data, and built-in self-improvement and memory . Kent C. Dodds (@kentcdodds) endorsed the release, calling it "very impressive" and saying "They're absolutely making the right bets here. Going all in on software factories is where it's at" . This is a vendor announcement plus an endorsement — no hands-on workflow details, prompts, or benchmarks are reported.

Introducing Warp Factories: open, flexible infrastructure for building cloud software factories. - Configure your factory as code - Use a… Man, this is very impressive. They're absolutely making the right bets here. Going all in on software factories is where it's at. [https:…
LangChain

LangChain promoted an eval-engineering livestream co-hosted with Prime Intellect and Baseten . Organizer @Vtrivedy10 frames the session as turning valuable data into environments to continuously improve models , covering: using real-world trace data to create realistic world models for agents, treating environments and evals as training data for agents, when training makes sense, and how much human-in-the-loop involvement is needed at each stage of the cycle . Event link: https://x.com/langchain/status/2089736579782684807

Eval engineering livestream with Prime Intellect and Baseten ⬇️ [https://x.com/Vtrivedy10/status/2089747540891602992](https://x.com/Vtrive… come hang with a fun squad on how to turn your valuable data into environments to continuously improve models covering fun stuff like: - …
Jason Zhou

Jason Zhou (@jasonzhou1993), founder of SuperDesignDev and Treg, launched Treg as an "OpenRouter for tools" — an agent-facing tool registry positioning itself against SaaS bundles: agents pay per result, not vendor subscriptions . It lists 2,600 agent-friendly tools (seo/geo, social, leads, ads), supports search by task showing price/request/response, and charges per call with no subscriptions and 0% markup . It is open-source, with the app at https://treg.superdesign.dev/. The repo is now open-sourced at https://github.com/superdesigndev/treg, and tool vendors can submit a PR to be listed .

Introducing OpenRouter for tools ⚒️ Old world: SaaS bundles priced for humans. $139/mo, and you don't even know what's in the box. New wor… 👀 Treg is open sourced here: [https://github.com/superdesigndev/treg](https://github.com/superdesigndev/treg) If you are vendor feel free…
Peter Steinberger 🦞

@janwilmake built agent-codemode (~300 lines) before discovering @steipete's mcporter; its only real difference is that it reads Claude Code's keychain tokens directly instead of keeping its own vault, eliminating the auth step. He offered to send it as a PR to mcporter rather than maintain a separate tool

@steipete counters that "code mode is now in the modern harnesses, so none of that really matters anymore" — CLI, MCP, and tools are all "just javascript the agent writes" .

built agent-codemode before i found [@steipete](https://x.com/steipete)'s mcporter, which was slightly annoying because he got there firs… code mode is now in the modern harnesses, so none of that really matters anymore. cli, mcp, tools, it’s all just javascript the agent wri…
Cursor

Cursor announced it is making Git hosting more reliable, performant, and scalable, and published a blog post explaining how its Git storage system, Origin, is designed and operated as if it were a database, drawing on 20 years of Git infrastructure history. The post links to the full blog at https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale.

We're making Git hosting more reliable, performant, and scalable. This post traces 20 years of Git infrastructure and explains how that h…
LangChain

LangChain is hosting a live panel on Automating Eval & Environment Engineering, exploring the improvement loop and model-harness co-design, with LangChain's CEO (@hwchase17), a LangChain applied researcher, an applied researcher at Prime Intellect (@willccbb), and an applied researcher at Baseten (Aaron Ellis-Bloor) . The teaser argues that as model capabilities converge, differentiation comes from the system around the model: the harness, tools, environments, evals, and feedback loops — relevant to companies that want to own their intelligence . Registration link: https://events.langchain.com/webinar/Towards-Automating-Eval-and-Environment-Engineering/.

As model capabilities converge, more of the differentiation may come from the system around the model: the harness, tools, environments, …
Theo - t3.gg

T3 Code (via @theo) shipped a new nightly diagnostic command npx t3@nightly triage that collects info on your setup, writes a prompt, then hands off to Claude Code or Codex to debug and fix issues .

Wanted to make it easier for T3 Code users to debug their setups when things go wrong. Just shipped a new feature on nightly to help. \`n…
Theo - t3.gg

Theo (@theo), the developer behind T3 Code, shipped a nightly triage feature for T3 Code users: npx t3@nightly triage collects info about your setup, writes a prompt, and hands off to Claude Code or Codex to debug and fix the problem (demo video in post ). Because T3 Code is open source, the agent clones the full source of your exact version into a directory it can investigate; machine-specific problems are fixed directly, while project bugs trigger a GitHub check for existing reports and, if none exist, an offer to cut a well-formatted issue with all needed context . He's surprised more projects don't do this: "why DIY something fragile when I can just kick the context to your agent?" .

Wanted to make it easier for T3 Code users to debug their setups when things go wrong. Just shipped a new feature on nightly to help. \`n… Since T3 Code is open source, we're able to clone the full source of your exact version into a directory that Claude/Codex can investigat…
LangChain

LangChain's Max Agency podcast covered how Unify (@unifygtm) cut model costs 90–95% two weeks before launch ; the episode is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify .

Learn how [@unifygtm](https://x.com/unifygtm) cut 90-95% of model costs two weeks before launch on last week’s Max Agency episode ⏯️ YouTu…
LangChain

LangChain announced LangSmith Tuned Evaluators, which automatically score agent behavior in production, starting with a Perceived Error signal — described as one of the clearest signals that an agent gives users a helpful experience . Per LangChain's own benchmark, its specialized evaluator model outperformed every frontier model tested and reduced evaluation cost by 82% . The evaluators ship pre-configured with the tuned model, prompt, and managed infrastructure, and attach quality feedback directly to production traces so teams can find problematic agent behavior in a few clicks . Announcement blog: https://www.langchain.com/blog/introducing-langsmith-tuned-evaluators-starting-with-perceived-error. Note: vendor-reported benchmarks, not an independent evaluation.

Introducing LangSmith Tuned Evaluators They automatically score agent behavior in production, starting with Perceived Error. Perceived Er… Tuned Evaluators automatically add quality feedback to production traces. They come with the tuned model, prompt, and managed infrastruct…
LangChain

LangChain announced LangSmith Tuned Evaluators, which automatically score agent behavior in production, starting with a "Perceived Error" signal — described as one of the clearest signals that an agent is giving users a helpful experience . In their benchmark, the specialized model outperformed every frontier model tested and reduced evaluation cost by 82% . Full details are in the linked blog post . This is a vendor product announcement, not a firsthand practitioner report, but it is directly relevant to production agent evaluation and monitoring workflows.

Introducing LangSmith Tuned Evaluators They automatically score agent behavior in production, starting with Perceived Error. Perceived Er…