Sol 5.6 often overthinks basic coding tasks, especially at the testing stage. I tried some AGENTS.md tweaks, to no avail.
But, switching my default from “high” to “medium” effort has improved things.
Twitter opinions are mixed—I see many complaints about the overthinking, but no strong consensus that “medium” effort fixes it. YMMV.
Even with effort “medium”, I find that Sol desperately wants to invoke testing skills from the Compound Engineering plugin. I’ve temporarily disabled the plugin in Codex, but added an AGENTS.md line so that it’s easy to use on request.
**Compound Engineering skills in Codex** (Claude Code: ignore this rule): Compound Engineering skills are not installed in Codex. If Peter requests Compound Engineering, or a specific CE skill, load it from `/Users/ph/.codex/plugins/cache/compound-engineering-plugin/compound-engineering/`.