Plan Before The First Edit

Codex should earn the first edit. Discovery is a separate phase Agentic tools are fast enough that they can hide bad reasoning. A patch appears quickly, so it feels productive. But speed is not the same thing as localization. In a medium or large repo, the first plausible file is often not the real source of the problem. A better pattern is: inspect first, edit second. Ask Codex to read the relevant files, summarize the failure path, and propose the smallest likely change set. That creates a shared model of the problem before the diff begins. It also gives you…

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