This is what I’ve discovered as well. I’ve been working on refactoring a massive hunk of really poor quality contractor code, and Codex originally made poor and very local fixes/changes.

After rearchitecting the foundations (dumping bootstrap, building easy-to-use form fields, fixing hardcoded role references 1,2,3…, consolidating typescript types, etc.) it makes much better choices without needing specific guidance.

Codex/Claude Code won’t solve all your problems though. You really need to take some time to understand the codebase and fixing the core abstractions before you set it loose. Otherwise, it just stacks garbage on garbage and gets stuck patching and won’t actually fix the core issues unless instructed.