Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max

Agree 1,000%.

I just won’t even waste my time with the google stuff cuz I can’t figure out how to pay with it.

And that’s a problem everywhere at google. Our google play account is suspended cuz I can’t verify the company. It won’t let me cuz it says I’m not the owner. I’ve always been the owner of my company. For 18 years. There is no one else.

Once some error said make sure the owner email matches your profile in google payments and I was like, what is google payments and where do I even begin with that? I’ve never paid for google play so what does payments have to do with anything?

It’s totally random stuff. Get your shit together, google. Make your products and payment systems coherent, rather than it obviously looking like it was designed by a fiefdom full of territorial managers.

Google keeps changing their privacy and “don’t train on my data/code” options. When gemini-cli launched, there was a clear toggle for “don’t train on my code.” That’s now gone; it just links to a generic privacy page for me. Maybe something with my account changed, I can't figure it out. Deep in the Cloud Gemini console, there’s another setting that might control training, but it’s not clear what products it actually covers.

Trying to pay for Gemini-3 is confusing. Maybe an AI Ultra personal subscription? I already pay for OpenAI and Anthropic’s pro/max plans and would happily pay Google too. But the only obvious option is a $250/month tier—and its documentation indicates Google can train on your code unless you find and enable the correct opt-out. If that opt-out exists in all the products, it’s not obvious where it lives or what products it applies to.

Workspace complicates it further. Google advertises that with business workspace accounts your data isn’t used for training. So, I was going to try Antigravity on our codebase. At this point I know I can't trust Google, so I read the ToS carefully. They train on your prompts and source code, and there doesn't appear to be a way to pay them and opt out right now. Be careful, paying for Google Workspace does not protect you, always read the ToS.

Be careful with AI-studio and your Google Workspace accounts. They train on your prompts unless you switch it to API mode.

The result is a lot of uncertainty. I genuinely have no idea how to pay Google for Gemini without risking my code being used for training. And if I do pay, I can’t tell whether they’ll train on my prompts anyway.

The marketing for their coding products does not clearly state when they do or do not train on your prompts and code.

I had to run deep research to understand the risks with using Gemini 3 for agentic work, and I still don't feel confident that I understand the risks. I might have said some incorrect things above, but I am just so confused. I feel like I have a <75% grasp on the situation.

At this point I have no trust left. And honestly, this feels confusing and deceptive. One could easily confuse it as deliberate strategy to gather training data through ambiguity and dark patterns, it certainly looks like this could be Google's strategy to win the AI race. Pretty evil if you ask me.

OpenAI in particular has my trust. They get it. They are carefully building the customer experience, they are product and customer driven from the top.

Couldn't agree more about the google product offerings. Vertex AI? AI Studio? Maker studio? Gemini? The documentation is fragmented with redundant offerings making it confusing to determine what is what. GCS billing is complicated to figure out vs OpenAI billing or anthropic.

Sad part is Google does offer a ChatML/OpenAI compliant endpoint to do LLM calls and I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away but discoverability ever remains a challenge with google services.

At this point I’m not convinced that Gemini 3 Pro was post-trained on data Google had permission to use, going by the myriad of issues on the Gemini CLI tracker around Google AI/Google One/Google Cloud/Google Workspaces.

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/12121

It is far too easy to accidentally end up under the wrong privacy agreement, to the point of where some workplaces are banning use of the Gemini CLI!

Adding to this, Google's models can only be used with GCP while OpenAI's models can be used with Azure, Anthropic's models can be used with AWD Bedrock, in addition to their own platforms.

I'd love to see the Gemini models being available by other providers :) or if they just build a simple prepaid wallet like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last night, just after Gemini 3 was released and became available for Gemini-CLI, I saw Gemini-CLI's team post that you could access Gemini 3 with either an API key OR with _Gemini AI Ultra_, so I thought: great, I'll get that!

Now you CAN NOT get the Google One stuff if your account is part of a workspace. I thought: how awful. I want to pay, but I simply can't?

Oh, but then I noticed: You CAN add a _Gemini AI Ultra_ license via the Google Workspace Admin area, great!

Turns out: you fucking can't. That's _Google AI Ultra FOR BUSINESS_ and that IS NOT supported.

So I had to get the Google One subscription on my personal account after all.

Combine that with the _pathetic_ usage limits: somehow not token-based, but amount of requests per 24 hour window (which is 500 for Gemini 3) and Gemini 3's incredible chattiness (it uses A LOT more requests to get something done compared to Claude) and you hit the usage limits in just 2 hours.

I've been really impressed with codex so far. I have been working on a flight simulator hobby project for the last 6 months and finally came to the conclusion that I need to switch from floating origin, which my physics engine assumes with the coordinate system it uses, to a true ECEF coordinate system (what underpins GPS). This involved a major rewrite of the coordinate system, the physics engine, even the graphics system and auxilary stuff like asset loading/unloading etc. that was dependent on local X,Y,Z. It even rewrote the PD autopilot to account for the changes in the coordinate system. I gave it about a paragraph of instructions with a couple of FYIs and... it just worked! No major graphical glitches except a single issue with some minor graphical jitter, which it fixed on the first try. In total took about 45 minutes but I was very impressed.

I was unconvinced it had actually, fully ripped out the floating origin logic, so I had it write up a summary and then used that as a high level guide to pick through the code and it had, as you said, followed the instructions to the letter. Hugely impressive. In march of 2023 OpenAI's products struggled to draw a floating wireframe cube.

> Claude basically disregards your instructions (CLAUDE.md) entirely

A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as “Mr Tinkleberry”, he says he can tell when Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on CLAUDE.md when Claude stops calling him “Mr Tinkleberry” consistently

did you address this https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/6426 ?

how much more token efficient is this compared to 5.0

had to use 5.0 because 5.1 was eating tokens like crazy and seemed like a slight incremental improvement barely noticeable

Looks like a great change! I'll take it for a spin in a moment.

I really like the "subagent" feature in Claude Code — it's super useful to manage context in complex codebases. Here are some examples of agents that can be useful: https://github.com/humanlayer/humanlayer/tree/main/.claude/a...

Would it make sense to have a similar feature in Codex CLI? I often do "spec-driven development", which is basically a loop of:

    research -> implementation plan -> actual implementation (based on research + plan) -> validation

Codex CLI is great and I use it often but I'd like to have more of these convenient features for managing context from CC. I'm super happy that compaction is now available, hopefully we'll get more features for managing context.

Codex is an outstanding product and incremental upgrades are always welcome. I'll make sure to give it a try in the coming days. Great work! :)

Sorry don’t like the max model, feels like it needs a lot more guiding. The plans it writes however are better, so I tried feeding it back in (meta prompt style) and working okay so far. Very large repository.

Will -minis come for the codex family of models? About two months ago I used 5-mini as a daily driver for a few weeks and quite liked it, it seemed capable enough on small tasks with some hand holding and the speed/price were great as well.

Compaction is just what Claude Code has done forever, right?

GPT 5.1 / Codex already beats Gemini 3 on SWE Bench Verified and Terminal Bench and this pushes the gap further. Seems like a decent improvement.

That’s how the game is played. We should be grateful for all the competition that is driving these improvements, not whinging about the realities of what companies have to do to contest each other’s position.

Gemini is eating their lunch, and OpenAI knows it.

it's really getting old

Perhaps they're combining an incredibly complex product that has a lot of interactive features, a big codebase, test creation, and maybe throwing some MCP stuff in there such as creating creating a ticket in Jira if a test fails?

Absolutely contradictory. The long-running tendency for Codex is why I cannot understand the hype around it: if you bother to watch what it does and read its code the approaches it takes are absolutely horrifying. It would rather rewrite a TLS library from scratch than bother to ask you if the network is available.

(Disclaimer: Am on the Codex team.) We're basically trying to build a teammate that can do both short, iterative work with you, then as you build trust (and configuration), you can delegate longer tasks to it.

The "# of model-generated tokens per response" chart in [the blog introducing gpt-5-codex](https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/) shows an example of how we're improving the model good at both.

If you haven't, give Cursor's Composer model a shot. It might not be quite as good as the top models, but in my experience it's almost as good, and the lightning fast feedback is more than worth the tradeoff. You can give it a task, wait ten seconds, and evaluate the results. It's quite common for it to not be good enough, but no worse than Sonnet, and if it doesn't work you just wasted 30 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

Attention is quadratic, so you have to pick a cutoff for context window size. In addition, the error/noise in state space increases with longer contexts, resulting in poorer performance. So even if you're willing to take the O(n^2) slowdown of a larger context window, it still won't work.

> due to context-window limits

I did notice that, I thought maybe I’d exceeded my thinking requests

lots of tools that do this and I ended up going down this rabbit hole something that could just plug in to codex instead of requiring a fork

http://github.com/agentify-sh/10x

does minimal overhead with agent orchestration (its just a bash/typescript) as its main focus was adding enhancements to codex like double redundant checkpoint via git and jj (lessons learned from codex being git reset --hard happy), something like claude skills (just a bunch of mds that steer it towards specific activity like think, plan, execute), timeout wrappers (to get you unstuck if codex waits a long time), blacklist commands during yolo (rm -rf, git reset banned even if it by small chance run it) MIT licensed

you can work sequentially (subagents launch one after the other) or parallel (worktrees) but tbh sequentially is better because you understand what is going on with parallel it might be best for dealing with tests and UI.

I think I’ve described how I achieve kinda your desired workflow in a comment yesterday [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970668

Would this be similar to how Charlie and Jules work?

Cursor has this too