Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/48195

167•whimblepop•1h ago

Comments

dingaling911•59m ago

This stuff is moving fast, should update automatically. This is kind of standard now. Browsers do it. No reason for harnesses not to do it as well.

icantevenhold•56m ago

My browser doesnt update automatically, i have to approve it.

Maybe this kind of stuff is standard for some people but I absolutely loathe auto updating software for many reasons

nicce•43m ago

For example, Firefox updates by default and forces you to restart it, disabling using websites or seeing any site content before doing so.

djsavvy•39m ago

I've been using Firefox for years and don't think I've ever seen this. Are you running some custom configuration?

nicce•15m ago

Firefox Developer Edition on macOS.

TeMPOraL•3m ago

Standard on Linux, I believe. One of many reasons I got back to Windows as my main OS (with Linux needs fulfilled by WSL).

Zambyte•31m ago

On your setup.

Firefox does not only not prompt me for updates (it only updates if I manually run an update), even if I do update with Firefox running, it does not stop me from continuing to use Firefox without restarting it. All I did was install Firefox from flathub (packaged by Mozilla (a default configuration provided by Mozilla)).

nicce•15m ago

I am running Firefox Developer Edition on macOS, where it is the default option. Have to set "Check for updates, but choose when to install" to get the similar behavior.

4chandaily•31m ago

Iirc, this is a pattern of the flatpack version of Firefox. I do not believe the .deb does this.

RobotToaster•30m ago

I've never seen that behaviour, it downloads updates in the background and then gives me a little notification that I should restart it to update, but it's dismiss-able.

nicce•14m ago

I think this is the old default option. What options you see in the update options?

six_seven•18m ago

Are you sure this isn't your organization's update policy kicking in here?

jstummbillig•37m ago

Being able to turn auto-updates off is okay, but that being the default would certainly not be okay in Codex, giving the reach, what it can do and how immature it is.

dv35z•26m ago

One practical reason - system stability for important events.

I travel for work, and often have a tech demo, solution, tool, or something to show - or am running a workshop.

I usually do NOT update things right before my trip, as I want to minimize the potential for disruption.

vorticalbox•15m ago

Isn’t this what docker is for?

Jokes aside I do the same I tend not to upgrade my Mac, my phone unless I really have to.

The “update” button on the top of my brave install has now turned from green to orange and I’ll likely wait until it goes red

TeMPOraL•5m ago

> Isn’t this what docker is for?

What? Pinning a browser?

First thing it'll want to do after starting is update itself to newest version anyway.

johnnyApplePRNG•55m ago

Sure yea just let sam altman install a rootkit on your box.

That's not odd whatsoever. /s

dingaling911•54m ago

you run it on the bare metal?!! Balls. I run it in a container

wren6991•55m ago

If software engineering is solved they should be able to get it right the first time

dingaling911•53m ago

CODEX WRITES ITSELF! DONT YOU PEOPLE UNDERSTAND!!!!!

bayindirh•52m ago

So you imply that Codex has a hoarding issue?

jonplackett•45m ago

It gets very attached to itself

Rapzid•10m ago

It loves hording issues. Over 15 THOUSAND on GH.

TeMPOraL•3m ago

Nah, you're confusing it with Autolith.

phoghed•14m ago

Coding is solved, software engineering still TBD

bayindirh•54m ago

You can do this without a daemon, and without storing n previous versions as noted by another user.

jmbwell•25m ago

Yeah this seems like a decision yielded by a model. One of countless examples of the model’s outputs careening into individually defensible but holistically nonsensical results

A human seems less likely to embark upon a path that most humans know leads to something a human is unlikely to want

LLMs produce amazing things, but only one token at a time. Anything beyond that is retrospectively emergent at best

swatcoder•46m ago

Products moving fast doesn't mean that they're moving in the direction I want, or that I want them to move underneath me while I'm in the middle of a project.

Auto-update systems have value but are not a suitable default for professional tools.

isityettime•38m ago

Ordinary package managers are totally capable of updating thousands of programs without manual effort, including automatically and in the background if that's a thing you want. But they do it without violating users' sovereignty over their own computers or turning every app into a special snowflake that gets to install software (namely itself) in its own bespoke way.

wtallis•37m ago

Serious tools shouldn't do this. Sure, you can offer an opt-in rapid release beta update option, but if you can't go more than a month without forcing me into a "stable" update that changes the UI and behavior I'm getting used to, then I'm not going to consider your software stable and reliable enough to be worth developing expertise in using.

RobotToaster•32m ago

Then use the package manager, or windows store on windows.

icantevenhold•58m ago

It also fills up my HD with old versions. I investigated and it took up something like 12 gigabytes in total on my system; which seems insane to me, it’s just a harness?

People moan about how badly made Claude code is but Codex seems much worse on every metric

bayindirh•55m ago

Remember: VSCode runs a complete headless Eclipse instance as its Java LSP, so I don't expect quality code from any of the big companies anymore.

dwattttt•38m ago

Are you referring to something built into VS Code, or an extension? It looks you're talking about https://github.com/redhat-developer/vscode-java, which is RedHat's doing.

accrual•37m ago

Yes, my DEV VM tended to fill up with VSCode backups as well. I finally expanded the disk so it's less of an issue today, but for a while ENOSPC was resolved by cleaning up ~/.vscode-server/cli/servers.

Onavo•51m ago

Even if you installed codex with brew?

umvi•50m ago

Can't wait until we get really well designed harnesses written in a compiled language that doesn't bloat my computer. Will probably have to be written by a company other than OpenAI because codex is like the exact opposite of everything I just listed

timdorr•37m ago

This is the same operational model as Claude Code.

  ls ~/.local/share/claude/versions/
  ps auxww | grep "claude bg"

I see a few prior versions of the Claude Code binary and several running background tasks, without any copy of Claude Code in the foreground. I regularly get a "Update available" message in my Claude Code UI too.

whimblepop•21m ago

This kind of stuff often breaks for applications packaged with Nix, so it's often removed from Nix packages for compatibility reasons. Both behaviors you mention are helpfully patched out of the Claude Code package I use: https://github.com/numtide/llm-agents.nix/blob/dc285bfd94ec7...

As a result, I never knew that Claude Code does a nasty thing like this, either. :-\

Fwiw, packages in that repo get version bumped each day, so if that's a fast enough pace for you it may be a good alternative.

javcasas•9m ago

And here is the issue raised in github: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14980

TLDR: They don't care.

reacharavindh•36m ago

I’ve been using GPT models via hax[1], a bare bones harness with minimal tools on my system and have the models rely on bash for the most part the last few months. It’s been a breath of fresh air amidst all these overengineered harnesses.

If I need special actions, I just make them CLI tools on my Mac and tell the AI model that such a tool exists(via a single line in its system prompt) and that’s it. It’s been very nice.

[1] - https://usehax.dev/

No affiliation whatsoever. Just a happy user.

agentdev001•23m ago

You seem to care, so I wanna point out a semantic nit; "such a tool exists" could be interpreted as a harness provided tool, rather than a command line tool. (Edit, on a re-read its pretty obvious you mean cli tool, but keeping this statment here as im sure it'll open someone's eyes to the difference)

I've gotta give hax a go, as a pi user who came on-board due to the no frills direction pi takes. I say takes rather than took, because regardless of the (heated) discussion surrounding mcp and code mode support, I cannot fight the numbers- augmenting the harness provided tools is a notable boost to execution round trip performance.

HackerThemAll•36m ago

Yeah, and for the contrary I spotted Claude app being ugly. When I turned off Claude, then put my computer to sleep and later woke it up, it made my fans spin loudly, and after I checked, there were like 2 dozen Claude processes and a lot of Python. What was it doing - I have no idea, but it was crazy. I'm setting up a VM with nothing but Claude and necessary tools. I feel Claude is not honest with everything it is doing.

dv35z•24m ago

Can you share some more detail of how you would implement this? Are you thinking something like VirtualBox (?), running a virtual machine, and you're using - for example, OpenCode terminal in the VM...?

esjeon•36m ago

I think the quality of Codex CLI (and Claude Code) is an honest reflection of the status quo of LLM-driven development. The future doesn’t look really promising.

sdcfgy•32m ago

Totally.

The problem is hardly anyone gives a shit if they can pump out stuff that makes them look like they are good at stuff.

Vanity before engineering.

whimsicalism•26m ago

I find codex CLI to be a pretty high quality application. Is the existence of a backend daemon what you're referring to ?

warpspin•21m ago

It's buggy like hell once you do not run the default settings. Whole permissions system is completely broken, for example.

demibabs•8m ago

It’s kinda vibe coding in a nutshell. Lots of cool and varied features, that often just don’t quite work right.

abighamb•18m ago

It has pretty rapidly reached the point where I do not think any acceptable LLM-harness is widely available. Every single one I've tried has broken in bizarre ways on even minor updates.

thebeardisred•34m ago

It's right about now that having a operating system distro model is great - you get folks who will package the software & test it out, make generally sensible defaults, and generally keep shenanigans like this from going on

Cyph0n•30m ago

Nix/NixOS takes it a step further and makes you have to go out of the way to enable self-updating behavior when packaging something :)

dv35z•30m ago

What are the top ones you recommend? ( I am running Mint Debian Linux )

quotemstr•26m ago

Refusal to adhere to the XDG specification is a big signal that the app is going to be a general bull in a china shop. It's not that hard to do OS- and distribution-appropriate package management.

whimblepop•11m ago

A well-behaved application should not only use XDG on Linux, but it should use platform-native conventions on macOS as well: "~/Library/Application Support", etc.

whimblepop•25m ago

There aren't any documented settings to disable this, but there is a feature flag it currently sits behind. You can flip it in your ~/.codex/config.toml[1]:

  [features]
  daemon_auto_start = false

There are also some files that it writes to in ~/.codex at startup: pid files, lock files, things like that. You can delete them and replace them with symlinks to /dev/null, then mark those unwritable with `chattr +i` or similar. Presumably then the background daemon will crash on startup, if the feature flag ever goes away.

1: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/0c329ad2c9d5a2592128a1d...

pilooch•20m ago

Yes this should be turned off by default. The daemon is useful when building apps on top of the daemon server, e.g. pi or pi-durable custom harnesses.

whimblepop•18m ago

What makes ACP deficient for headless uses of LLM agents? Maybe fixing that or standardizing on another protocol designed for pluggable LLM agents (I guess ACP is more oriented towards pair programming in an IDE, at least originally) is a better idea imo.

vunderba•11m ago

Yep, the real issue is that it was something they didn’t have before, and then with Codex 0.157.0 enabled, they installed this persistent nonsense [1] that survives after the last instance of Codex has exited on your machine, which is just gross.

  codex features disable daemon_auto_start
  codex app-server daemon stop
  pkill -f 'app-server daemon pid-update-loop'

[1] - https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/48195

Sha1rholder•18m ago

Off-topic: I think the front-end quality of ChatGPT/Codex Desktop and Android app is simply dreadful—hard to imagine how such a large number of frequent failures made it into production. Do they not use human testing at all?

grimgrin•18m ago

while this points it out, i'll show you what I had in place:

~/.codex/config.toml

    [features]
    daemon_auto_start = false

hell, I also have this redundancy configured in bash:

    codex() {
      command codex --no-daemon "${@:-.}"
    }

warpspin•16m ago

All I'd want is a CLI with a few tools AND a built-in, properly configurable and working sandbox. Seems that's too much too ask.

phoghed•12m ago

Just be the 10th person to make one this week.

piker•16m ago

It's not necessarily hostility. We considered different updating approaches with our legal IDE where security, stability, etc. are paramount, and having a buggy application out in the wild is user-hostile. Sure, in a dream world we'd say "don't ship until it's perfect", but that's just not realistic.

We considered the daemon thing, but ended up with a hard-update check on every boot. It's thus a user choice: if you don't like the automatic updating, you can just not run the application anymore.

And even with all that, it's hard to stay on the right side of AV algorithms, etc.

We wrote about it here: https://tritium.legal/blog/update

TeMPOraL•9m ago

> It's thus a user choice: if you don't like the automatic updating, you can just not run the application anymore.

That's not a choice. It s just what most apps do these days, but it's the first time I've seen anyone stating this so directly, or trying to frame it as a choice.

(And behaviorally, this makes your product just a SaaS website with extra steps.)

piker•2m ago

I guess I mean it's a choice in the sense that it's a transparent part of the product that one chooses how and when to use (or not). That's opposed to something running in the background on its own schedule, with its own agenda whether the user is running the application or not.

No idea what the second sentence is supposed to be suggesting? It's software that is sold as a service, yes. But installing it yields a superior experience to the web version.

dllu•10m ago

The daemon has many bugs. For example, when auto-updating, it would randomly ruin the permissions and block the goal as .git became read-only. Generally, it is extremely annoying how many bugs Codex has. I basically can't trust it to execute on any goal since it would often get blocked every few hours due to random bugs.

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/52251#issuecomment-60...

gruntled-worker•3m ago

You can just copy the executable then run it with --no-daemon, or edit the config equivalently. No autoupdates and no background process.

The recent terminal UI changes were more fastidious, but even those are easily disabled with CODEX_TUI_DISABLE_KEYBOARD_ENHANCEMENT=1 and the /tui command.

ilitirit•2m ago

I use it at work. On Windows it also launches a new console window every it executes (?) a command. You should definitely disabled this using --no-daemon.

I don't know how and why they ruined this CLI with needless "features". It was perfectly usable two weeks ago.

umutsevdi•2m ago

I discovered this while benchmarking the tool I'm developing. I realized Codex was surprisingly fast after the initial run. Some other harnesses do similar things, so I decided to use bwrap around these tools for accurate benchmarking.

Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

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Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

Comments

Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

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