Sol 5.6: medium effort for coding, with Compound Engineering disabled

9 AugustWorkflow Coding Skills

I’ve often seen Sol 5.6 overthinking coding tasks. This causes over-engineering and excessive testing, even for very simple changes.

I tried a few 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/`.

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I’m learning to work with AI, to help make AGI go well. This is my study journal.

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I’ve often seen Sol 5.6 overthinking coding tasks. This causes over-engineering and excessive testing, even for very simple changes.

I tried a few 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.

**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/`.