Agentic Patterns — CodexHow

Codex is genuinely good at agentic coding and genuinely bad at it in specific, predictable ways. This section is about the pattern, not the tool — how to scope a task Codex can actually finish, when to let it run its own tests, why long sessions lose the thread, and when agentic coding is the wrong approach for the problem in front of you. None of this is OpenAI's official guidance; it's what actually happens in practice, written down.

These guides pair naturally with the sandbox and approval section — how much autonomy you grant a session and how well-scoped the task is are two separate levers, and getting only one of them right rarely produces a good result on its own.