How we use /goal to find bugs in Patch the Planet

Researchers used Codex's /goal feature (a tool that lets AI work toward open-ended objectives) to find bugs in widely-used open-source projects like Rust and curl as part of Patch the Planet, an initiative with OpenAI. They discovered that effective bug hunting with /goal requires treating prompts as success criteria rather than instructions, and found that letting Codex itself draft the goal prompts—including red-teaming them to spot potential shortcuts—produced better results than writing goals manually.