De-Bloating - What helped fix my Codex performance issues

Hi,

So a couple of days ago I was kind of bothered about the speed of Codex even using medium effort level on fast mode; it would take a long time for the first token to be produced and tool calls would take a long time. However, when I first started using Codex a few weeks ago I didn't have these problems.

I am not an expert, I am just a normal person who uses these coding agents and so I asked Codex about why this could be happening and it ran a diagnostic on my computer.

It said there were a few problems:

1. I only had 19GB remaining on my C: drive. So, I freed up 150GB.

2. I had GMAIL, Outlook, Computer Use, Power BI MCP and Chrome plugins on at the start of each session. I turned them all off as I rarely use them.

3. I might be using heavier reasoning effort levels when medium/low could do the job. I now use low/medium and found that low is very good and snappy.

4. Apparently I had some constant loggings of skill warnings which was causing overhead, Codex fixed it.

5. I had it delete skills it didn't need so it didn't have to keep thinking about them on every turn.

6. My global AGENTS.md was quite large and placed a lot of constraints which was limiting its freedom. I removed everything from it as they were nice to haves but not essential.

7. I had some of the local AGENTS.md write to my Karpathy LLM wiki files almost every turn. Now, I request this to be done manually when I have finished a session.

8. Removing conflicting skills i.e. no real need to have both Front-end design and Impeccable.

Each may have only made a marginal difference, but in the past 48 hours Codex has been fast and much more enjoyable to use.

I am sure these are obvious to many of you but I thought there might be people out there that don't realize how much bloat and additional constraints can cause slowdown.

Hope this helps.