Codex in VS Code doesn't dismiss the approval window, preventing codex from advancing and requiring a VS Code restart
What version of the IDE extension are you using?
VS Code v1.109.2 with Codex extension v0.4.71
What subscription do you have?
Plus
Which IDE are you using?
VS Code
What platform is your computer?
Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.19045.0 x64
What issue are you seeing?
When codex requests approval to run a process (bash, powerscript), sometimes clicking "Yes" or "Yes, don't ask again" does not dismiss the approval dialog. The AI continues working, but the dialog remains on screen.
This results in three issues:
- It's no longer possible to chat with codex.
- If another approval dialog is requested, it's never shown and the codex waits forever for approval.
- There's no way to abort the chat (no stop button visible).
The only fix I'm aware of is to restart VS Code, but re-using the prompt results in the same issue.
I've noticed it seems to happen more often when codex appears to be requesting multiple approvals at the same time (e.g. 3 bash requests). When I pressed "Yes", codex wrote "A couple of reads were blocked".
A sort of work-around is to include "If you need to perform any action that requires asking for approval, only show one request at a time until I approve, do not send multiple approval requests at the same time (e.g. use single read commands)" in the prompt, but that's not a perfect/friendly solution and doesn't always work.
Here's a screenshot showing the issue:
<img width="865" height="600" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/36362593-9784-4047-8a3b-86cce1757c59" />
What steps can reproduce the bug?
The bigger the project, the more it happened, for example when requesting several slices from a large file at the same time.
What is the expected behavior?
Close the approval dialog once I click one of hte options.
Additional information
You can also see other users suffering from this issue on codex's reddit community:
https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1r0sska/anyone_have_this_issue_i_cant_click_or_do/
7 Comments
Same issue, makes Codex 5.3 essentially unusable within vscode.
@bLightZP & @Trayse-code, we've fixed this in the latest prerelease version. Please switch to that and let us know if you still see the problem.
I'm having the same issue this week.
@etraut-openai, I have switched to the pre-release version and it seems that is working very good now.
@voedito, thanks for the confirmation. We will be promoting that prerelease version to the production release shortly.
I'm going to close this issue.
Unfortunately, this happened again today and right as I restarted VS Code to continue working, codex updated itself to v0.4.74 of the extension.
Since the update happened so closely to the issue, I'm not sure if the issue was fixed or not by the update.
VSCode needs to have the config file turned on. So, the reason you are not seeing it work is because you need to explicitly tell VSCode to use the config.toml file. It is confusing because setting the model and reasoning effort updates the config.toml file, but the other parameters don’t take unless you select the option below. Ensure you click the "Change Permissions" button below and select the custom config.toml file.