GPT-5.5 has become reckless

It eagerly hunts for tasks and rushes to execute them.

For instance, yesterday I asked it to analyze some bugs. It quickly claimed to have found the issue and requested permission to fix it. I approved it the first time, but it had no effect. When I told it to keep looking, it went ahead and applied a fix directly without giving me a chance to reject it. It failed again, and as it was about to keep fixing, I finally hit the abort button. After that, it took repeated requests from me before it was willing to generate a log to inspect the issue. There were also times when it should have used debugging tools but refused to do so.

This shouldn’t be a placebo effect on my part, nor should it be caused by changes to agents.md, because it never used to act this way.

Today, I was working on some omitted code that needed to be submitted as a PR.

This code involves replacing a whole bundle of previous features with a new path.

It didn’t review the documentation I provided, so it assumed this code (which isn’t exactly new to it either) was missing some functionality. It then came up with a plan to merge everything back in.

This might sound a bit disorganized, but to sum up: it now pushes forward without a second thought and fails to consider problems thoroughly. This leads to a lot of wasted effort, fails to solve the actual issues, and significantly increases my cognitive load and time costs.