I've had those as well. Sometimes I'm asking clarifying questions because I'm not sure about the solution, and the LLM "interprets" that as pushback (as opposed to curiosity / enquiry), and sycophancy takes over. Sometimes it will simply change the code without ever answering the questions, or it will answer the questions along with it, but incorrectly - or with bad assumptions.
> Answer grounded in truth, with evidence and concrete proof, no guessing or assumptions allowed, no changes to files on disk.
I've used this a bunch as a suffix to try to prevent that, works OK in most cases, but not always obviously, works better in the system/developer prompt if you have access to those. Seems I've used that about ~1000 times since 2025/08 when I started using codex (- transcription duplications, so maybe 1/2 of that?).
$ rg -a -o "Answer grounded in truth" ~/.codex/sessions | wc -l
1046
This is why I love plan mode and switch to it as soon as I see the agent starting to deviate from the plan because it hit a wall. Gotta get back to aligning on design decisions, approach, reverting any debug code, etc. before progressing. (Damn, I have more instructions to add to AGENTS.md lol)
Although this was more of an issue when using opusplan as Sonnet loves to do this. I only use Opus now if using Claude.
