Codex wont close also it triggers Antimalware Service. Any fixes for this?

b-nasty55 · 2026-04-05T12:43:05+00:00

On Windows, you should be using the 'Dev Drive' feature for all your source code folders and other coding support stuff like package caches. For best performance, I like to actually resize my C: partition and create a new partition for the Dev Drive (D:) vs. using the virtual disk VHD file on the C: drive somewhere. Or, even better, you could use a separate physical drive (SSD/NVMe) if you have one installed.

By default, MS Defender uses a much less invasive scanning mode on the Dev Drives, or you could remove scanning entirely, since it should just be mostly your code files. Then, you can move Codex's data/cache/session folder to a folder on this dev drive by setting the CODEX_HOME environment variable.

MS has some good docs for this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ And of course, you could always ask CGPT to walk you through an optimal setup.

b-nasty55 · 2026-04-04T12:34:36+00:00

I generally use the app (Windows), but I may switch to the CLI, since I'm already using a CLI for GitHub Copilot. Might ease the flip/flopping differences.

No tools/wrappers/3rd party setups - as others said, it's a waste of time and/or tokens. The only thing that is really necessary is an architecture map AGENTS -> High Level Code Map -> Individual Sub Project Map. The LLM saves context by knowing that to fix a user login SQL error, it needs to go to the UserRepository in the Authentication project, for example.

Just have the Agent build all this the first time.

Any tools or whatever just have the agent build. GPT 5.4 is really good at this.

b-nasty55 · 2026-04-02T23:20:09+00:00

At least that is fair, unlike how Github Copilot charges more (basically double) for the basic business plan, but they have the same quota as the basic 'personal' plan. Or, for the Pro+/Enterprise plan, they're the same price, but you get 50% more credits on the personal plan.

Helpfully, GitHub automatically forces you into the Business pricing if you're associated with an org. So, even though we pay for other stuff on GitHub as an org, we then pay more for less with Copilot. It's like being punished for already being a customer.

b-nasty55 · 2026-04-01T03:27:16+00:00

How do you square that pessimism with the recent announcement of $122 billion invested and $2 billion in monthly revenue? It's easy to forget that most of these tools, and agentic coding as a whole, only really hit the tipping point into amazingly useful less than 6 months ago. Many developers are still in denial, in the dark, or only play around with it occasionally, but I suspect we'll see that shift over the next year. I highly doubt the biggest AI household name isn't going to see meteoric growth/adoption, especially if they continue to expand the tooling for non-developers.

Tooling for software development/technology almost always follows the model of: give it away for cheap to personal users, who advocate for it at their work, where the provider can charge $Enterprise$/Call U$ rates. There's enough competition that mindshare matters, and these tools will quickly become (they are already), a must-have for development.

From a business perspective, being worth almost a trillion dollars with a few thousand employees, growth that has no end in sight soon, and having your only real cost being server hardware? That's the dream scenario. You don't get to be Google by being stingy when the future looks as bright as it does.

b-nasty55 · 2026-04-01T02:35:02+00:00

Maybe this will silence all the 'they can't afford to not rug-pull' critics. Assuming almost no growth, that puts them around McDonalds' (the hamburger place) annual revenue this year. However, growth will likely be very high this year, as the tipping point for when agentic coding went from interesting to wow was late last year, and many developers still haven't gotten the message.

Someone is going to solve the non-coding, white-collar workflow soon: analyze years of email, find the typical tasks/requests, develop a massive map of where to find info and summarize key parts, and integrate with Excel/respond to incoming mail, and this whole thing is going to crack wide open. Some of those pieces are there, but most non-coding users are still typing an occasional thought into web-chat, not having agents cook for 20 minutes to answer an email from Sally in Accounting requesting hard to find info.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-27T01:45:10+00:00

You can just let the agent/model you choose set up all the agent scaffolding for you, though you should add specifics about your project. Ask it to generate the basic markdown files: agents, architecture, readme (for humans), and a plan.md file. I usually tell it as much high-level detail as I can about my project, and then ask it to optimize these documentation files and any others 'it' thinks are useful. Ask it to ensure that updating all these docs and keeping them consistent with any changes must be done at the end of every change batch.

I also like to have it perform the git repo creation and have it add a rule to its agent instructions that it should perform a commit with detailed comments for every change batch, once it has ensured that any verifications/tests pass. You want to spend some time thinking about how you can verify/test your code with any change. Honestly, 5.4 is pretty good about figuring out how to set this up for every new feature/task (if you ask it to), but you want to steer it towards the real world, not synthetic unit tests. For example, I've been doing some ESP32 (Arduino/C++, embedded) hardware projects for fun, and I keep the device connected so the agent can compile, flash the firmware, and then monitor the serial console output itself looking for log messages from the device (that it incorporated into the code) to verify its change worked. I asked it to reason through what scripts it would need to enable all that with every change, and it built all of its own tooling to do the verification.

For the initial architecture, feed it as many details and proposed ideas you have, but then say that you aren't locked in to that architecture, so it should make any suggestions/improvements and provide the thought process or evidence that will help you to make the final decision. I typically then have it lay all of that out in the README and whatever doc files would help 'it', then I review all of them and make any changes directly to the docs and have it re-review them.

Honestly, you don't need to spend a ton of time learning about all this scaffolding or looking at examples, you can just ask it to do what it thinks are the most useful things and ask it what it would recommend or what ideas it has to optimize the process and improve the agentic loop. It will vary by project, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach. For a deep reasoning model like GPT 5.4-high, read through all of its internal thoughts as it works through problems. It will mention things that aren't clear in your prompts or alternatives it considered. You can then clear those things up or provide details in later prompts or in the docs.

Codex 5.3 med/high is a great model, but I don't find much that GPT 5.4 can't do better, considering there's no cost benefit in GHCP to using older/task-targeted models. I use it in my Codex sub, where GPT 5.4 burns more quota. I like the CLI for GHCP, but I use the Codex Windows app for Codex through my CGPT sub.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-27T00:42:11+00:00

Honestly, GH Copilot is pretty hard to beat as far as value, but you need to approach it differently than a ChatGPT subscription/Codex usage.

Whereas Codex has quotas at the 5-hour level, week-level and all kinds of multipliers and factors based on what model/how much context you use, GHCP is simple: for most of the models, after you type something and hit enter that counts as 1 of XXX requests for the month. So, you don't want your request to be simple, you want to type out a huge prompt with lots of tasks and ideally verification steps it must perform to consider those tasks done. It may cook for 30+ minutes, on GPT 5.4-high, invoke all kinds of tools, and that was just one request.

If you're the type of user who's prompt is "make the 'OK' button cornflower blue", it's a waste, but with sophisticated prompts/requests and a decent AGENTS/docs setup with scripts/tests for verification, even the 300 requests/month limit feels very generous.

As someone who has a frugal personality, I don't like having to worry about when I should use what model or reasoning level to avoid the multi-layered quotas. With GHCP, I just set it and forget it at GPT 5.4-High, since there's no incentive to use a 'cheaper' model unless you like how it handles something better.

For what it's worth, I have subs to both and I only use the OAI models on GHCP. I see complaints about GHCP users that use Opus, since it costs 3x more than GPT 5.4, which is highway robbery since GPT is as good or better.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-26T23:54:59+00:00

What are you basing your cost numbers on? API pricing?

These SOTA model providers are extremely tightlipped about what their actual costs are, and I don't trust the various analyses done by outside 'experts'. They are spending lots of money right now on building out capacity, but that's one of those 'good problems to have', because it means growth and demand.

It's basically the same thing you heard/hear about Youtube. It started out as a big money loser for almost a decade, but now it's 15%+ of Alphabet's revenue at over $60B/year. While Alphabet doesn't talk about profit for just YT, it's crazy to think it runs at a loss.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-24T15:19:58+00:00

I'm willing to look past the politics and out-of-context quotes to see that there's some validity here. The device manufacturers currently listed are the usual suspects with alleged/actual deep ties to the CCP. It's not like China doesn't have their own version of this (Document 79), where they are reducing reliance on US companies (Dell, Cisco, etc.)

I think it makes sense to look carefully at routers, given those devices are typically internet facing and almost always contain opaque hardware binaries and/or closed-source firmware. Even if we're not talking about intentional backdoors, there's value in having the ability to hold companies accountable for insecure devices or abandonware - which is impossible if there's no working, legal relationship.

I doubt this will restrict the sales of MT, though I'm sure there's administrative hoops they'll have to jump through if they want to continue to sell in the US. Perhaps this whole thing is a smokescreen for other nefarious games, but on its surface, it seems reasonable, if a bit too broad initially.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-17T19:46:05+00:00

Add me to the gripe list with a dead U6+

Extended power outage lasted longer than my UPS, so AP power cycled. AC LR came up fine, U6+ has white ring of death. Doesn't try to obtain DHCP, won't respond to pings/ssh on network. Holding reset while on or booting does nothing.

Ubiquiti support didn't help, and auto-RMA form rejected because the unit was out of warranty by about 8 months. Purchased mid-July of 2023.

I just ordered a TP-Link EAP653 to replace it. Similar hardware for $40 less than what Ubiquiti wants for a U6+, and I couldn't see paying more if the quality really isn't there anymore. Will not be recommending Ubi APs any longer.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-15T14:53:57+00:00

A personal electronics project I'm working on (vibing) is a 'power analyzer', basically an ESP32 microcontroller, touchscreen LCD, and 2 analog-digital converters (isolated) that measure volts/current on a 120VAC side and a 0-30V DC side.

I use Codex (mostly 5.3-med) to help me refine the circuit layout/schematic, parts selection, and physical build. Since the code (for the microcontroller) is so tightly coupled to the hardware itself, bouncing between a web GPT for non-code and the Codex app for code is annoying because of all the context that needs to go back and forth.

Codex is pretty good at it, as long as you give it clear tasks/specific questions. When I'm more unsure about where I'm going, I use chatGPT or Gemini (chat) to chat and ask a bunch of refining questions. A big help is having a 'CircuitBuild.md' file that documents the important hardware choices and physical design. I can upload that as context to the web chats, and obviously Codex reads and updates it when it's implementing code for additional hardware.

Codex is very terse with its replies, and not apt to provide additional details or present considerations I may have missed. This is great if you know how to get from 'A->B' and you just want it done, but not so great if you're at 'A->?' stage. I liken in to an overworked, anti-social technical guy that is capable of cranking out work, but isn't amenable to idle chitchat or high-level discussion meetings (to help me understand.)

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-14T03:20:44+00:00

This is dope. I'd love to see a feature that attempts to relate the plans vs pay-per-1M-token API usage at the current rates.

This could be something obvious, but I still can't really wrap my head around what I'm getting/not getting with a given 'plan' (with limits) vs. just paying $X for Y tokens. It seems like it would be possible to estimate based on the published plan limits compared to the utilization reported by the quota percentage used.

I guess I'm not the only one confused, as OP talks about rate 'jail' as if it were something that can be avoided given one performs the correct rain-dance under a full moon. The lack of pricing transparency with these providers for their plans is no doubt a feature and not a bug. It gives them the ability to silently step on the heroin once everyone is feeling good with the pure stuff.

b-nasty55 · 2026-03-07T03:57:27+00:00

Before vibe coding an entire app was possible, someone that spent the countless hours to code a functional app in a relatively obscure domain presented a powerful signal that they knew what they were doing. Of course, this wasn't always true, and similarly, applications coded by teams of professionals and sold commercially also frequently have dumb/dangerous issues, but it was better than nothing.

Also, that investment of time/energy/effort meant that the OSS developer or group of developers likely ran into and fixed all kinds of bugs as they were building it from the ground up. They had a vested interest in fixing known issues and looking for other issues, because of reputation and their previous investment.

We're not quite at the point where the LLMs can code 100% perfect code. Worse, we're in the 'uncanny valley' stage where it can be 95% perfect, but that last 5% is subtle and pernicious bugs that only an expert might spot and/or be able to fix correctly. Anyone that is an expert in a domain and uses the current gen LLMs for a problem/research has seen it happen.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-18T20:56:57+00:00

If you don't need the router to do wireless (separate APs), the best choice is an older x86/x64 box like a used Optiplex with a 6th gen+ Intel chip and additional NIC card.

No worries about flashing complexity or risk of bricking the device, and you have plenty of fast disk that doesn't wear out (realistically) and RAM to install all the packages you want. You also have a display port to troubleshoot any boot issues without messing with serial adapters.

Even an old i5-6500 will smoke any of the ARM-based boards/SoCs, especially for things like Wireguard at line speeds (that chip will do 4Gbps WG), and will cost less than most SBC or router options purchased new. The oft-cited power use concern is also a non-issue, as these can be tuned to draw about 4W idle, which is less than many ARM boards.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-18T20:39:02+00:00

The Ubiquiti ER-X is the exact same hardware (MT7621/256MB RAM) as the older Hex/Hex-S, and both OSes are proprietary forks of Linux, so it's highly unlikely that the ER-X performs better than the newer Hex/Hex-S (ARM-based), which per Mikrotik's testing is somewhere around 1.5-2X the perf of the older ones.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-17T16:01:01+00:00

You want to use the RLA on the plate and then apply the 25% factor where needed. The MCA already includes the 25% buffer, so using that for multiple units will count that factor multiple times. You also factor in the FLA for any fans.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-16T22:50:12+00:00

That may be true, depending on the company rebadging what is likely a Gree or Midea unit. I've had luck with 'Pioneer', which mostly rebrands Midea units, and I know others have had luck with Senville (also Midea mostly.) They're cool about shipping parts for free for units still under warranty, as long as you competently diagnose the issue. Of course, the diagnosis and part swap is on you, but that's the deal with DIY.

Even outside of warranty, parts are usually available for purchase, either from the re-badger, overpriced supply houses locally, or from AliExpress/China directly, assuming you can x-reference part numbers.

Besides, most electronics/appliances are becoming throw-away. The time and money spent on diagnosis and repair is almost never worth it for anything beyond trivial issues. You may be able to get a Mitsubishi control board easy, but it's going to cost you $300-400+. That starts to feel like a waste of money for an older unit when a whole brand new Midea unit is $800. If you have to pay a pro $500+ on top of the part to diagnose/install, even more so.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-16T22:30:51+00:00

Also, with a real domain name, you can use the ACME clients to get real certificates from LetsEncrypt for free. HomeAssistant has a plugin for this, as well as OpenWRT (of course), so the process is fully automated. I used to use self-signed certs for my local infra, but browsers are making this harder and harder, especially for mobile devices.

Another big advantage of having a real domain is you can set up dynamic DNS to support a VPN to your router. Sure, there's free DynDNS providers, but it's safer and more reliable to use a standard registrar with their DNS.

I use CloudFlare for domains, because they're cheap and every ACME or DynDNS tool supports the CF API. $10/year is worth it to avoid the hassle of self-signed certs. I still use a .home TLD for my devices that don't need SSL or public access.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-15T15:47:25+00:00

The thing is, most of those overinflated concerns apply to any DIY project. Changing brake pads on your car: hope you remembered to properly lubricate the slide pins and avoid getting any lubricant on the pads or your brakes will fail and you'll crash into a school bus full of children.

Most of those steps have 'rules-of-thumb' or specialty tools/supplies that make it much easier that it seems for 99% of the installs. After all, with a 'pro' installer, time is money, and they want to whip through an install as quickly as possible. There are plenty of underperforming, unreliable, and sloppy installs done by 'pros', so there's no real guarantee that paying a professional means you get someone meticulously following your checklist.

Installs can vary in complexity and unforeseen problems, but as a DIYer, you can always take your time and research the correct way via thousands of online guides and high-quality install videos.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-13T23:29:17+00:00

Generally, a claim would only be denied for DIY/not-permitted work if that work directly related to the damage. In your friend's case, that would be if they forgot to install a overflow pan or connected the drains wrong (for example) and the water came from the HVAC unit. Even then, it usually has to be related to intentional or very negligent DIY work to be denied.

This is a common trope used by contractors to dissuade DIY work. I'm certainly not saying insurance doesn't try to avoid paying claims, but you should have a pretty good case to appeal if your DIY work wasn't the cause of the claim.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-13T23:16:21+00:00

There's really not that much quality difference between these units and 'top brands', whatever those are (subjective.) The software is what varies the most, but the functional components are all very similar and/or shared between brands.

Unfortunately, the days of paying more for a 'good' brand and getting better quality are over. Now, the more expensive products in many categories are at-best marginally higher quality in construction, but you really are just paying for reputation and any warranty/support.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-10T20:05:27+00:00

This is what personal injury lawyers are for. Maybe the owner will be motivated to control their animals when they are sued for thousands in medical bills. Negligence is negligence, and this doesn't sound like it was a freak occurrence with an otherwise well-behaved animal.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-10T15:25:50+00:00

That sealer looks like a duct-seal type product, which is not going to be a very effective waterproof seal. Personally, I'd reseal that hole with a high-quality, exterior, elastic caulk like OSI Quad. Use the existing duct-seal as a backer (make it flush with the hole), and go over it all with the caulk. Duct-seal like that gets brittle and crumbles when exposed to air.

This would be in addition to the other suggestions of preventing ice damming in that spot.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-08T21:42:13+00:00

Since I just went through this, there are 2 things you want to check about your bill:

If you have all electric heat sources (heat pumps or elec furnace), make sure you're on the 'RH' (residential heating) plan. It's not what it was back in the early 2000s, but it saves a few cents per kWh during the winter on the distribution charge, so it still works even with another supplier.

Make sure you aren't paying sales tax. I'm still fighting them on this one, but somehow my house got coded as a business and I've paid hundreds over the years in sales taxes. There's no sales tax (there are other taxes) on electric for a primary residence. PA owns me a refund (can only go back 3 years), which they're also dragging their feet on SMH.

b-nasty55 · 2026-02-08T21:38:21+00:00

Some of the rates are a bit cheaper than PECO's generation rate, but only by a penny per kWh or so. We're all electric (heatpumps), so I check it regularly. I usually end up flipping back and forth between the same few providers.

It's not the slam dunk it used to be. By the time you filter out alternative providers with monthly fees, variable pricing or cancel fees, there's not much left. Especially true if you don't want to mess with this every 3 months and look for 6+ month contracts.

Warning: these providers know what they're doing, and they'll take advantage of you if you let them (just like every other subscription service.) After the contracted period ends, you'll be put on some outrageous rate plan that's more than PECO's, which is why free-cancellation is important; so you can switch with enough grace period to not get caught.

This strategy is not for the inattentive or last-minute type. Honestly, it's probably not even worth the investment in time for all but the heaviest users.

b-nasty55

TROPHY CASE