alt Hacker NewsI haven't done a ton of testing due to cost, but so far I've actually gotten worse results with xhigh than high with gpt-5.1-codex-max. Made me wonder if it was somehow a PEBKAC error. Have you done much comparison between high and xhigh?
Replies
robotswantdata • yesterday at 11:12 PM
For a few weeks the Codex model has been cursed. Recommend sticking with 5.1 high , 5.2 feels good too but early days
tekacs • yesterday at 10:55 PM
I found the same with Max xhigh. To the point that I switched back to just 5.1 High from 5.1 Codex Max. Maybe I should’ve tried Max high first.
This is one of those areas where I think it's about the complexity of the task. What I mean is, if you set codex to xhigh by default, you're wasting compute. IF you're setting it at xhigh when troubleshooting a complex memory bug or something, you're presumably more likely to get a quality response.
I think in general, medium ends up being the best all-purpose setting while high+ are good for single task deep-drive. Or at least that has been my experience so far. You can theoretically let with work longer on a harder task as well.
A lot appears to depend on the problem and problem domain unfortunately.
I've used max in problem sets as diverse as "troubleshooting Cyberpunk mods" and figuring out a race condition in a server backend. In those cases, it did a pretty good job of exhausting available data (finding all available logs, digging into lua files), and narrowing a bug that every other model failed to get.
I guess in some sense you have to know from the onset that it's a "hard problem". That in and of itself is subjective.