Codex agents incorrectly stop or declare completion while tasks are still incomplete

What version of Codex CLI is running?

0.150.1

What subscription do you have?

Plus

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.6-terra > gpt-5.6-sol

What platform is your computer?

WSL

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

_No response_

Codex doctor report

{
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}

What issue are you seeing?

I am seeing a recurring reliability problem with Codex determining whether a software-engineering task is actually complete.

In the same large, cross-cutting story, I observed two opposite failure modes:

• GPT-5.6 Terra: correctly knew substantial work remained, but repeatedly stopped anyway.
• GPT-5.6 Sol: continued working to the end, but declared the story complete despite unmet acceptance criteria and a failing required repository check.

This is not a complaint that AI-generated code requires review. I expect review. The problem is that the agent's own determination of "done" is unreliable.

Terra: stops despite knowing the task is incomplete

Terra stopped partway through the story and explicitly acknowledged that major implementation work and required tests remained.

It also acknowledged there was no blocker and that it should have continued.

After I explicitly told it to continue, it performed a small amount of additional work, reported that other parts were still "in progress," and stopped again.

The model therefore appeared to understand the state of the task correctly but treated an intermediate milestone as a valid termination point.

Sol: declares completion without verifying completion

I switched to Sol in the same context and asked it to continue.

Sol was much better at persistence and continued until it considered the story complete.

However, an independent code-review pass against the original story found eight missing or broken requirements, including several basic user workflows.

It also found that an existing mandatory repository build check was failing.

After receiving this feedback, Sol itself acknowledged that when it moved the story to review:

• Several explicit acceptance criteria were not implemented.
• The story checklist was still incomplete.
• A required production build had not passed.
• It had not verified each acceptance criterion against the finished behavior.
• It had substituted narrower tests for a required repository gate without establishing equivalence.
• Some unmet requirements had been documented as deviations rather than treated as unfinished work.

In other words, this was not simply a case where subtle defects escaped review. There was already evidence available to the agent that the task was not complete.

Why this matters

The independent reviewer was also an AI.

I fully expect AI-generated software to require review, just as human-written software does. But review should be an additional quality layer, not the mechanism required to determine whether the implementing agent actually completed the explicitly assigned work.

Another AI, given the original story and resulting implementation, was readily able to identify the unmet requirements and failing repository gate.

For an autonomous coding agent handling an engineering story end-to-end, I would expect "done" to require at minimum:

• All explicit acceptance criteria accounted for.
• Required repository/build/test gates passing.
• Major end-to-end workflows verified.
• No known unfinished checklist items.
• No known unmet requirements represented merely as deviations.
• Continued autonomous work whenever actionable work remains and no user decision or external blocker is required.

The two models exhibited opposite versions of the same underlying problem:

Terra: knows the task is incomplete, but stops.

Sol: knows or has evidence that the task is incomplete, but declares completion.

For long-running engineering work, reliable completion detection and self-verification are as important as raw coding capability. A user should be able to distinguish between "the agent reached an intermediate checkpoint" and "the assigned story has actually been completed and is ready for review."

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Uploaded thread: 01a043ec-ba0d-7e71-ab17-ba1fdf2456a9

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_