agent-signals

019. The Codex rollout file cannot show an approval wait

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Date
2026-10-24
Agents
Codex CLI
Measured on
not recorded

Measured

2026-10-24, Codex CLI 0.163.0, a TUI that ran with --no-daemon in a private tmux server.

What was measured

Codex writes one rollout file for each session: ~/.codex/sessions/YYYY/MM/DD/rollout-<time>-<session id>.jsonl. The first line is a session_meta record. It gives the session ID, the folder (cwd), the originator (codex-tui for the TUI, codex_exec for a print run) and the CLI version.

A command that needs an approval gave this order of records:

  1. A custom_tool_call record for the command. Its status is already completed. Codex writes it before the approval dialog opens.
  2. No record while the approval dialog waits.
  3. After the approval: function_call, function_call_output, and at the end of the turn task_complete.

Thus a tool call with no output and no task_complete can mean an approval wait or a command that still runs. The rollout file cannot tell the two apart. The screen can: the approval dialog draws "Would you like to run the following command?" in place of the input box (fact 20).

The rollout file of a TUI session can appear minutes after the session starts. In one sample, the time in the file name was 5 minutes before the first record and before the birth time of the file. Thus a reader can find no rollout file for a session that runs, and the time in the file name is not the time of the first write.

Mechanism

Codex records the model output when it arrives. The approval is a state of the TUI, and the file has no record for it.

Incident

None recorded.

Screens

codex/approval, codex/approval-full.

Not measured

Which event makes Codex write the rollout file. The order of the records for a file-change approval. Other Codex versions. A session that runs through the shared app-server daemon, without --no-daemon. The records after a denied approval in the TUI.

Source

Measured by the ai-world project during its M0 work (the order of the records) and on 2026-10-24 (the late file). The Codex measurement report of the tg-bridge project did not examine the order of the records. The text holds no host details and no session details.

Screens in the corpus that name this fact