If by "just breaks" means "refuses to write code / gives up or reverts what it does" -- yes, I've experienced that.

Experiencing that repeatedly motivated me to use it as a reviewer (which another commenter noted), a role which it is (from my experience) very good at.

I basically use it to drive Claude Code, which will nuke the codebase with abandon.

I've had codex rm -rf the git repo it's working in while running in yolo mode. Twice, even! (Play with fire, you're gonna get burnt.)

I had it whip this up to try and avoid this, while still running it in yolo mode (which is still not recommended).

https://gist.github.com/fragmede/96f35225c29cf8790f10b1668b8...

I've seen it think for a long time and then just timeout or something? It just stops and nothing happens.

Ive had the same but i only use it through zed so I wasnt sure if it was a codex issue or a zed issue

we're all senior continue engineers nowadays it seems