One thing I’m still trying to reason about with Codex is when a run should be stopped rather than allowed to keep spending context, steps, and time.

Some failures are obvious: repeated test failures, the same edit being attempted multiple times, or the agent circling around the same error message.

But the harder cases are more subtle:

A run looks like it is making progress, but the diff keeps growing in the wrong direction.

It keeps adding abstractions instead of fixing the actual issue.