Comment by whimblepop

4 hours 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...

4 comments

whimblepop

pilooch 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.

Twirrim 4 hours ago

For whatever reason, the daemon has been refusing to start and Codex has been grumbling to me. I was wondering where the daemon had come from, and thought maybe I missed something previously and that it had just broken.

vunderba 4 hours 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