Codex logging bug may write TBs to local SSDs

Codex is one of the most infamous examples of slopware. Just having the window unhidden on my mac will cause it to use 100% of the GPU displaying the spinner message.

THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!

So any time you're waiting on the model (which is 90% of the time), your fans will be blasting (careful, don't use it on battery).

The issue is on github and close to 6 months old. Probably since the release of vibe coded junk. I would literally fix it myself but it's closed source for whatever reason.

There are many discussions about which model is better, or if vibe coding is even possible. I point you to the extent of what one of the most well funded, money flush, well staffed model making companies can do with vibe coding.

To me a screwup this bad (where the CEO has already made it clear they're now "focussing on coding") indicates that there's something truly broken in the company. No one on polymarket expects them to have a leading model any time soon for example.

It's a tragedy. The world needs competition to anthropic.

Someone posted a temporary workaround for this on X[1].

sqlite3 ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite "CREATE TRIGGER IF NOT EXISTS block_log_inserts BEFORE INSERT ON logs BEGIN SELECT RAISE(IGNORE); END;"

Also, I found that running VACUUM FULL on the sqlite file on my laptop shrunk it from 27GB to a mere 73MB[2].

[1]: https://xcancel.com/bdsqlsz/status/2067964486615810369

[2]: https://xcancel.com/jeethu/status/2068087449469780434

Well, everyone's bashing on OpenAI as well they should, but just a reminder, unlike Claude Code, Codex is officially available to customize here: https://github.com/openai/codex

It's fairly easy to patch.

Shocking. Been open a week and AFAICT just silence from OpenAI. I just find it baffling. You'd think that these vendors would be very sensitive to this sort of issue. I mean, surely they have multiple agents hooked up to github monitoring potential issues and proposing fixes, right? ...right?

Surely it should be trivial for them to have their own tools spinning away trying to fix all the github issues in real time...

Vibe coding takes "move fast and break things" to a whole nother level.

OpenAI really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory late last year when Claude Code was a laggy mess.

Nowadays Codex has typing latency out of the gate, whereas Claude Code has the odd pause but generally displays my key presses as … you know … I press them.

This is actually such a classic blunder (shipping trace/debug logging on for everything), but funnily the impact is not in a normal way.

It's crazy we have hit a point where memory, CPU speed and disk speed isn't getting clapped because a Dev shipped logging at trace level instead of what used to the application being catastrophically slow so its immediately fixed in the next update.

Somebody please donate some tokens to this plucky startup, they need our help.

Blegh, I puke every time I see obviously AI generated comments in GH PR's. You cannot assume any of these people have done their research, other than telling Codex to do it for them

A good moment to switch to an open solution like opencode or pi.

I want to like codex, but the quality is just not very good, especially when compared to Claude.

It used to work okay, but a while back they landed a major regression for an entire team of folks I work with.

No response, no workaround.

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/23762

I think part of the question should be, why is there no QA or test that catches this? It's one thing to be slopware, but why didn't anything run a test that catches this?

i hope they find the smoking gun, the key insight, the kicker.

I have noticed absurd lag from the browser usage and sometimes complete bricking of my network too on my computer. I thought it was just my computer getting old, but possibly it's ChatGPT.

Same issue with Claude Code btw — it writes massive debug logs to ~/.claude/logs. Had to symlink it to a tmpfs to stop wearing out my SSD.

If something like this is helpful or necessary, that’s what ram backed tmpfs is for.

I'm struggling with how this much logging information could be generated at any level of verbosity. Is codex writing log entries while it's sitting idle? Why would someone want to look at these logs?

Can someone tell me if the current sub-agent of codex is available now? There used to always be a spinning issue.

This thread will become a typical "haha slop company made slop" but I've been bitten by a bug exactly like this before in a (pre-AI, artisan) OSS project. The maintainer there didn't properly account for DST when calculating last backup time, so the app started and never stopped writing/re-writing backups continuously.

Perhaps the framing shouldn't be "haha slop" but rather why doesn't the AI write better quality software than we do? To which the answer is obvious IMO -- even emergent properties can't elevate AI intelligence too far above the training dataset. So how do we get to superintelligent (or at least "not-wreck-your-NVMe-endurance-telligent") AI, if we, as a whole, are not smart enough ourselves?

Judge not the slop-bot, lest ye be judged yourself, engineer.

The first of many bugs that are beyond the complexity of its authors, thanks to comprehension debt.

Even with tests, the more complex the code base is, the more risky it is to vibe-code on it without introducing more bugs [0] and increasing the debt. Does not matter if the CI is green or if all the tests pass.

It gets even worse if you can't explain the change / pull request or what the implications are after applying that "suggested" fix.

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...

The operating system has historically trusted the applications not to do dumb things too much.

Only now we're witnessing the consequences much more frequently thanks to accelerated slop.

SQLite + unbounded TRACE logs = firehose in a bathtub. No rotation, no cap, no surprise. The RAISE(IGNORE) fix patches a design flaw. OpenAI's silence is worse than the bug.

Why didn't the review process spot this obvious error? Oh wait ... @codex review this

Yikes. I have a habit of leaving sessions open for a long time. I just ran `sudo iotop` to watch live disk activity and sure enough all my idle codex sessions were spinning away writing god knows what constantly to disk.

I don't understand how Codex can blunder so badly. I imagine that even if they would be using vibe-coding, surely they must have some good engineers. So why is there such severe bugs?

One can argue that these products are the flagship products of their respective AI companies aside from the AI models themselves of course.

I imagine that this story will be picked up by the news left and right, some stories just feel this way and this one is like that (given 12 upvotes on HN in 7 minutes)

The only logical conclusion (from this incident) that I can have is: An (vibe-coded?) product is hard to maintain even for some of the best engineers and is bound to have severe bugs.

2. Proper testing and taking issues seriously is the key if you still wish to do this and there isn't much. This is a week old issue which I can only classify as severe.

I wish to keep an nuanced opinion about it but oh this is bad for openAI (not as bad as them accepting autonomous AI within drones and mass surveillance though)

My point is: AI has both uphills and downward valleys and cliffs. It might as well just accelerate you, which could be, towards your downfall as well. Its recommended to keep an eye while driving and not drive too fast.

AI companies might be like car companies which don't offer a brake pedal.

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