The Best Coder I've Ever Worked With Will Nuke Your Files

gpt 5.2 xhigh in the Codex CLI is the greatest coder I've ever worked with. Puts Claude to shame on raw output. It will just — solve the thing, correctly, the first time, in a way that makes you feel like you've been watching amateur hour your whole career.

It also, without warning, reverted a pile of changes I didn't make.

The purpose was good. It wanted a clean diff before committing. Reasonable instinct. Noble, even. The method was to simply undo anything it didn't recognize — which is a perfectly logical approach if you assume nothing else in the universe exists. No other terminal. No other editor. No collaborator. Just Codex, the files, and the void.

What I ended up adding to AGENTS.md:

Never revert, reset, checkout, or otherwise undo changes to files that are not directly part of the current task. Assume any unrelated diffs may be intentional work happening in another terminal/editor. If a clean diff is needed, ask first and wait for explicit approval before taking any destructive Git actions.

The model is extraordinary. It's just not bondable — not the kind of thing you want sitting next to you all day. Claude is more like a colleague who occasionally misses things but won't quietly rm -rf your afternoon's work in pursuit of a clean commit.

Both are useful. The question is what you're optimizing for, and whether you've AGENTS.md'd your way out of the catastrophic failure modes first.