Comment by dannyw
5 hours ago
If you’re using the API, both OpenAI and Anthropic models will happily update you on what it’s doing in significant and frequent detail with system prompting. You’re not getting raw/hidden thinking, but what you’re describing is more behavioural quirks of the harness and its system prompts.
The other explanation is just as part of ‘token efficiency’
thanks for the advice. i'll dig into this more.
that could help tackle half of the problems here. i do think the other 100% completionist part is something i'm more used to steering through with llm usage, have negotiated fora while, and that Astra is particularly an astronaut whose instincts are extremely strongly in the direction of foreseeing and outdesigning potential problems, that it is rarely going to pick a practical sensible clear path on it's own.
You can override the system prompt in Codex, but AGENTS.md should probably work as well. Ask the agent to communicate intermediary updates more often using the “commentary” channel.