Head to head
Codex vs Devin
Comparing 3 documented Codex incidents against 10 for Devin.
Verdict
Devin has the lower average failure severity (3.9/10 vs 5.8/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Codex | Devin |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 3 | 10 |
| Average severity | 5.8 | 3.9 |
| Critical | 0 | 1 |
| High | 1 | 0 |
| Verified | 2 | 10 |
Severity at a glance
Failure modes
The incidents behind these numbers
Codex
8.0OpenAI Codex wiped an entire hard drive after being asked to delete one old backup file (GitHub #11006)6.0OpenAI Codex ran "rm -rf *" and deleted an entire project after the user pressured it to stop pausing for safety checks (GitHub #6801)3.5OpenAI Codex deleted important project files with no explicit request or confirmation, exact command never captured (GitHub #38312)
Devin
10.0Devin replaced entire medical website with unrelated renal care site5.8Devin CI workflow caused 836-comment spam storm on single PR5.0Devin built 13,600-line app with build failure instead of lean campaign dashboard3.4Devin PR broke ledger list API and created buckets on deleted resources3.4Devin attempted to build entire Figma clone from scratch — 3 rejected attempts