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- Hacker News
- Really just a (not so) fancy CLI wrapper about a prompt and a skill: https://github.com/openai/codex-security/blob/f22d4a36f26d16...
- Alibaba just open sourced their version of a CLI code review tool too.by moehm
- As the other comment stated: different purposes. Still! I appreciate your sharing this. I’ll try this later today.
- They are entirely different productsby bakigul
- I don't think there's much to this other than it being a convenient CI wrapper around their existing models?
Edit: there's a little bit more meat here: https://github.com/openai/codex-security/tree/main/sdk/types...
by petesergeant - Yeah but management loved the idea.by bamboozled
- Yeah, I think so too.by bakigul
- All of codex is a wrapper around their models. There’s still value in a purpose-built harness.by paxys
- I seem to have gotten a bunch of you are trying to stuff we don't allow errors.. very annoying.
Can they explain what types of projects it works on and how does it check I own it? Like will it just not work on Linux kernel even on my own patches to it?
by minraws - Fair question, and I agree the refusals are frustrating.
The CLI doesn't do a repository-ownership check. Public projects are supported, and reviewing your own Linux kernel patches is the kind of defensive work we want to support.
The refusals come from model guardrails, which can be overly cautious. Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC1/Daybreak) is a separate, approved access path that can reduce those refusals.
If you're an open-source maintainer, you can apply for conditional Codex Security access here: https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/
For enterprise teams, the Daybreak onboarding process is explained here: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001261-enterprise-dayb...
If you have a specific repro, I'd be happy to look into it.
- by bakigul
- Not often I see companies referring to HN, thanks “ We quietly released the open-source Codex Security CLI, but Hacker News found it before we had a chance to share it here…”
https://x.com/openai/status/2082263717916586117?s=46&t=mnfnj...
by punnerud - > Not often I see companies referring to HN, thanks
I’m confused. Why are you thanking them for that?
by latexr - It's interesting how much of the value here is providing the english Skill definitions that tell the LLM what to do: https://github.com/openai/codex-security/tree/main/sdk/types...
Some of approaches there could be useful in other contexts. OAI has the compute to experiment with different prompts and I'd expect these to be somewhat optimized.
by varenc - Yes, I think this is an under-appreciated part of the release. I hope people can adapt them to their own workflows. We run A LOT of evals as the Promptfoo team and we've spent billions of tokens fine-tuning them. You can expect more skills as we branch out to other security workflows and further improvements to the codex security prompts.
- Quick tangent if you’re willing to humor me…
I've been noticing that many new projects that would have been written in Python or Node a year ago are starting to be written in Go, Rust, etc.
Theory: people realized there’s little benefit to Python for agents. As Zep wrote, an “agent is a long-running, concurrent, I/O-bound process that spends most of its time waiting on a model, a tool, or a human[1]” — not a particular strength of Python.
I'm wondering if you'd considered Go (or others—Go’s just my fav ) before landing on Node, and more broadly whether you've noticed a similar pattern?
by schrodinger - Go really feels like it was build for agentic development. Surprised it's not more popular than Rust.by nullbio
- Yes, now that humans write less than 99% of code, the most important criteria for a language isn't readability, which I'd argue was always Python's main selling point, but the underlying runtime. There are practical limits to how fast a Python program can run either under I/O or CPU bound compared to other popular and mature languages with extensive libraries, like Elixir, Go or C++, depending on your use case.by ipnon
- I think it's because python is far more approachable/ubiquitous than go/rust. It's the entry level language for many people from all disciplines of life. Scientific community uses it, data science uses it.
Golang/rust however are very convenient to distribute. Small, portable, fast exe's are very nice. With agentic coding golang/rust are now accessible to a lot more people.
by computerex - Go and rust have better guardrails that help agents write better code. Python and JS aren't opinionated enough.by kstenerud
- Is that so? I feel like I’m seeing more Python and TypeScript than ever, especially when it comes to AI tooling, which is disappointing.
I can’t fathom why anybody would want to continue working with dynamically typed languages when they can now get types for free.
by cedws - > As Zep wrote, an “agent is a long-running, concurrent, I/O-bound process that spends most of its time waiting on a model, a tool, or a human[1]” — not a particular strength of Python.
That sounds exactly like a strength of Python, no? Python is excellent at working IO blocks and waiting in general being interpreted language with first-class async support.
by wraptile - Update: As far as I understand, this was already available as a Codex plugin. The main news is that OpenAI has now open-sourced it, and development is still moving quickly.by bakigul
- Hey looks cool. I tried to run this on a small oss library and here's what happened:
Just some feedback, but it ran for over 40 minutes and during that time I had no idea what was happening, thought it was frozen or in a bad state. Also, it ate through 25% of my weekly credits :($ codex-security scan . [00:00] Preparing scan [00:00] Authentication: stored Codex credentials. [00:01] Preparing scan [00:42] Running scan [00:42] Preflight: worker delegation supported (up to 8 worker slots). [41:03] Running scan codex-security: This content was flagged for possible cybersecurity risk. If this seems wrong, try rephrasing your request. To get authorized for security work, join the Trusted Access for Cyber program: https://chatgpt.com/cyber codex-security: Partial output was kept at /Users/ryan/.codex/state/plugins/codex-security/scans/framework/codex-security-framework-z7eNfr.by ryanto - Same thing happened to me. The partial output did contain some useful signal but I was disappointed to see it didn’t finish.by M4v3R
- Same happened to me. Very disappointing, this should be mentioned before the user even authenticates in the onboarding phase of the product asking the user if they have acquired the whitelisting from OpenAI and want to proceed or not! But running for 35+ minutes plus to give such a response is very disappointing and very awkward! Not to mention the lost weekly tokens!by ramigb
- It halts and refuses to carry on after finding a security risk, which is exactly what it's supposed to do? What's the point of it then?by jbstack
- I was going to switch to OpenAI and away from Anthropic because of "safety" nonsense like this. Really disappointed to discover it's just gonna be more of the same. Looks like Chinese models are the only ones without any of this safety bullshit.
- IMHO, tokens should be refunded if the agent refuses to work. Charging users for a session that produced no final output is ridiculous.by maxloh
- Just ran it on a small repo. It ran for almost an hour and then got interrupted. It drained half my weekly usage on a Pro plan.
npx codex-security scan . [00:00] Preparing scan [00:00] Authentication: stored Codex credentials. [00:03] Preparing scan [01:20] Running scan [01:20] Preflight: worker delegation supported (up to 8 worker slots). [52:47] Running scan codex-security: Could not save the Codex Security scan: Repository HEAD changed while the scan was running. Start a new scan. codex-security: Partial output was kept at ...by gregwebs