Agent Memory

Turn On Codex Memories and a Hidden Agent Starts Up

Codex CLI 0.165.0 (27 October 2026) made memory v2 the default for fresh profiles. Hands-on with eleven empty CODEX_HOME directories: 'fresh' means ~/.codex/memories does not exist, an empty folder with that name keeps a new install on v1, memories.version accepts only the strings "v1" and "v2", memories.dual_write = false pins v1, and neither key is in the configuration reference. Memories stay off by default, and the v1 database file is created even then. With memories on, the first start spawns a hidden consolidation agent on GPT-5.6 Terra (medium effort, approvals never, workspace-write sandbox, network off) that runs rg, sed, find and git inside the empty memory folder; when codex exec exits within about 15 seconds the job is recorded as failed_agent with a retry exactly 3,600 seconds later, and with a 90-second turn it finished in 23 seconds and wrote a 241-byte template summary. The external_agent_memory_import flag the release note implies is under development and off.