Adjusting Codex plan mode

Codex Codex CLI
1

Hi OpenAI team!

I’d like to thank you all for your amazing work and tools first!

And want to propose improvements for Codex Plan Mode:

  1. Save somewhere the plan the codex proposed for the first time as a file
  2. If the user requests changes to the plan, make changes to that file

Current flow: codex stores the proposed plan at the context window, and if I request any changes (even the small ones) and ask it not to change anything else, it still rewrites the plan due to LLM non-determinism.

It’s very hard to go over the plan review again and again. I want to see only the small changes Codex made to our plan, not a rewritten plan from scratch.

2 Likes
2

Hi, welcome to the forum.

Here are some little tips that I use:

  • Once plan mode is ready to implement, hit the stop button/say no.
  • At this point you can also change the model/reasoning levels. This way you can make the plan with xhigh reasoning and implement with high/medium reasoning and save usage.
  • Prompt this as a follow-up:
    Save this plan in myplan.md, break it down into tasks with checkboxes for each task and tick them as you implement them.
  • This will also prevent compaction from damaging your plan execution if it is too complex.
  • For incremental changes, you can refer your myplan.md and ask codex to update it with new changes, and use git to keep track of what is modified.
2 Likes
3

For some of my repo’s I add a roadmap table as part of the README.md that way when I feel like it, I can dip back in to a codex session and pick off a roadmap item. This may be too high level for you, but essentially it means that todos are a persistent file!

Usually I try to cover off a whole roadmap item in one session, so persistent “interim” goals aren’t necessary.

The other benefit of this is that blue sky thinking is not lost.

1 Like