Codex
3 articles
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CodexTurn 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.
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SecurityA Web Page Can Plant an AGENTS.md in Your Downloads
On 22 October Forever Security described stopping a coding agent on a customer's machine as it installed the malicious npm package function-color on the instructions of an AGENTS.md in ~/Downloads that nobody had put there; their proof of concept is a web page that saves such a file into Downloads with no click, and BleepingComputer found Chrome, Edge and Firefox do it while only Brave asks. With a harmless canary AGENTS.md in my own Downloads folder, Codex 0.164.0 injected the file only when Downloads itself was the working directory (session rollouts confirm it), while Claude Code 2.1.310 loaded it from Downloads, from a plain subfolder and from a subfolder with its own git repository, because it walks every directory from the working directory to the filesystem root; a repository unzipped into Downloads inherits the planted file. Loading was deterministic but obedience was not (Haiku 3 of 6, Codex 1 of 2). For Claude Code a claudeMdExcludes glob, --setting-sources user, the Project instructions setting, or a project CLAUDE.md kept the file out. Nothing is patched because both agents are reading instruction files exactly as documented.
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OpenAICodex Now Leaves a Server Running After You Quit
Codex CLI 0.157.0, released 25 September, enabled daemon_auto_start by default: a plain `codex` launch now starts `codex app-server --managed-daemon`, a process that outlives every Codex window, copies a 374 MB package into ~/.codex/packages/app-server-daemon/, and spawns a detached updater that checks chatgpt.com five minutes after start and hourly after that. An update restarts the shared server with a 60-second grace period before force-kill, across every attached session. The config reference, developer command list and changelog do not mention daemon_auto_start or --no-daemon; the updater can only be disabled by editing a settings.json documented in a README inside the source tree. The GitHub issue filed on release day reached 540 points on Hacker News on 12 October with no reply from an OpenAI account.