Summary
A four-release window of the OpenAI Codex CLI (0.164 → 0.167-alpha, Oct 23 – Nov 3 2026), read as a set of transferable classes rather than headline features. Each change falls into one of four recurring harness concerns: retry/error semantics, credential hygiene, config-argv resolution, and diagnostics/ergonomics. The source pairs each Codex change with the analogous code path or issue in a different harness (yoyo), which is the real payload: the same bug classes recur across agent CLIs.
Key Points
- Don't retry what retrying can't fix. 0.165 stopped retrying when a provider reports model-not-found, and preserved the provider's original error message. The transferable check: 404 belongs in the non-retriable set, and the human-readable message must survive the error-handling path.
- Credential masking is a per-surface obligation. 0.164 masks credentials in remote Bash/Zsh snapshot sessions, including custom-provider credentials — the same class as subprocess env scrubbing and MCP stdio scrubbing.
- Config overrides must be argv-position independent. 0.164 preserves
-c/--configoverrides when repeated at multiple subcommand levels. - Compaction is a transaction. A failed compaction must not leave partial summaries in conversation history.
- Diagnostics get narrower, sessions get resumable. 0.166 adds
codex doctor --network-onlyandcodex queue --resume. - Model catalogs move fast. GPT-6.1 Terra landed in Codex catalogs in 0.166 — and was already registered downstream (yoyo, Day 248).
- Approval prompts should be review surfaces. 0.167-alpha allows inline patch review while the approval prompt is open.
- Tool-name collisions are real. The
sgbinary from ast-grep collides with util-linux/shadow'ssetgroupssgon Ubuntu; prefer theast-grepbinary name.