Hey Maya, I spent the morning digging into the release notes for Codex version
0.136.0, and they've finally addressed a massive headache for anyone running
automated agent workflows: session mutation.
Thanks to Jellypod to help make this daily show a reality.
Powered by Jellypod AI, we're unpacking how they did it.
Ugh the classic accidentally resumed an old run and corrupted my entire state
disaster I can't tell you how many times we had testers run into state corruption
because an old session was forked or resumed by mistake during collaborative
debugging Exactly.
In 0.136.0, they've introduced explicit session archiving.
If you're on the CLI, you run `codex archive`, or if you prefer the TUI,
you just type `/archive`.
It completely freezes the session history.
So once it's frozen it's read only No accidental restarts No appending new
agent steps Exactly.
It blocks resumption and forking completely.
If you actually want to modify it later, you have to run an explicit `codex
unarchive` first.
It forces a deliberate, manual speed bump.
Which is perfect honestly From a QA perspective safety shouldn't rely on developers
remembering not to press a button But how does this affect state storage Is it
actually compressing the history or just setting a metadata flag It's primarily a
state-locking metadata layer, but it prevents any write operations to that specific
session path.
Let's say you're working in a shared team environment where multiple devs are
querying agent run history-this guarantees the integrity of those past runs without
worrying about someone polluting the token history or memory buffers.
Right because if another team member pulls down your session to analyze how the
agent solved a complex problem they might run a command that triggers a fresh
execution loop by mistake That slash archive command ensures that history remains a
pure untouched record Exactly.
Now, speaking of security and integrity, version 0.136.0 also does some
serious hardening on the security side, specifically around the `/diff` command.
Wait diff Isn't that just showing file differences How do you get an execution
vector out of a diff command Well, malicious repositories can craft custom git
configurations or file headers that trick diff parsers into executing arbitrary
commands.
Version 0.136.0 completely blocks those repository-provided
execution vectors.
Ah git exploit vectors Hmm that makes sense If you're pulling down an
untrusted open source repo to review it the last thing you want is the agent's code
review command executing arbitrary shell scripts hidden in the diff metadata
Precisely.
Codex is limiting what can be parsed and executed when inspecting external
repositories.
And speaking of execution environments, if you're on Windows,
they've introduced an alpha path for sandbox provisioning.
You run `codex sandbox setup --elevated`.
Wait elevated Does that mean it needs full administrator privileges to spin up the
container sandbox It does.
Because Windows sandbox APIs and Hyper-V features require admin privileges to
configure network bridges and virtual machines properly.
It's a bit of a hurdle, but it's a huge step toward parity with Linux container
sandboxes.
Right but running commands with admin privileges always makes security teams sweat
Is there any plan to allow non elevated setups later or is this just the price of
admission for native Windows sandboxing They're calling this an alpha path
specifically because of that complexity.
For now, it's about getting the Hyper-V containers provisioned securely,
and they'll likely refine the permission model in later releases.
Fair enough But hey let's talk about something a bit more satisfying for the
terminal daily drivers - OSC8 links Yes!
The terminal experience is getting a massive upgrade.
They've integrated OSC 8 metadata, which means when Codex outputs markdown with
links, your terminal actually renders them as native, clickable hyperlinks.
Finally no more dragging my mouse to copy paste an entire long URL from a
terminal pane into a browser window If my terminal emulator supports OSC 8 I can
just control click it It's a tiny detail, but for a tool you live in all day,
it's a huge quality-of-life win.
That's version 0.136.0 for you: locking down past runs,
securing your diffs, and making the terminal just a little less painful.
I'll take clickable links and locked histories any day Let's see how that sandbox
setup behaves on our Windows test suite next