Auto Drive Upgrades

[zemaj]

I've deployed several significant upgrades to Auto Drive;

1. Automatics model routing
   While Auto Drive is active the system will choose which model and reasoning level for the core CLI. So this means when it's doing planning or research it might use 5.3-codex High or XHigh but while iterating on errors it might use 5.3-codex-spark instead.

2. Optimized agent usage
   Earlier versions of codex models were reluctant to use agents, which meant we had to be really forceful in our coordination prompts and schema. We also pushed parallel execution of agents to resolve issues where one agent produced poor results. Codex 5.2 and beyond are much better at making choices and choosing the right path the first time. We've now pulled back on the instructions so that agents are chosen more appropriately and less redundant work is performed.

3. Better verification
   Now that coding agents are more capable, we can focus less on doing the work vs verifying the work. We've altered our instructions and output schema to focus on coverage of testing and edge cases. This change, combined with using spark to iterate on errors, has far surpassed my expectations. Just last night Auto Drive built a complex app from a single prompt which runs multi-CLI benchmarking on Daytona, external test and data importing and full UI and published it internally on CloudFlare workers. And every part works! By comparison a month ago a similar task might have taken me a week of work.

4. Better long term stability
   Auto Drive is now designed to run for days at a time. With performance improvements you might find it hard to get it to run that long! But previous sessions would slow down after around 12 hours and follow up sessions could struggle. This should no longer be the case with some clean up and decoupling of core threads.

I've been using the Codex Mac app for some UI work, but coming back to Auto Drive after these changes has really made me realise how much more I can do when the routine work is done for me. Give it a go!