Improved handling of config file errors
What variant of Codex are you using?
CLI, Extension
What feature would you like to see?
I propose a pro-active effort to have Codex report specific issues in specific files to the UI/client when such issues are found during processing. It seems at the moment that an exception might be ignored or simply not thrown/handled.
@Urkman reported in #9001 :
I found the problem with the help of Codex CLI 0.80. This version showed me an error a skill file. Codex in VS Code silently failed.
@etraut-openai responded https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/9001#issuecomment-3734975032 :
Codex should be more resilient here — or at least provide a better error message
If there is an issue with config.toml, a skill config,, or some other file being processed, Codex silently fails with the UI reacting in different ways. The UI should report these issues clearly for resolution. Maybe in a debug log with a debug flag set to avoid breaking changes with existing UI's?
This might be related to #11727, as for me those issues began at the same time as I found an invalid prop in config.toml. Fixing that error didn't address the other failures, but there might be another config error that leads to the other failures. Without helpful tooling, I simply can't know.
Additional information
_No response_
3 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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I recently made a series of improvements to both the CLI and the extension & app to provide better error reporting for errors in config files and rules files. If you update to the latest version, you should see this. For the CLI, errors are now reported with a specific text range and a non-zero exit code. For the extension and app, errors are now reported using toast notifications in the UI that provide a link to the file with the error. Let me know if you see problems with these mechanisms or have suggestions for how we can further improve this.
Skills files fall into a different category from config and rules files. It's our goal to support live updates of skills, which means that we need to detect and report errors a bit differently. If there is an error in the frontmatter portion of a skills file, you should see that reported in the conversation stream.
Sincere thanks. I'm now running Codex VSCode extension 0.4.71 because of #11727, and was trying the alpha CLI for #10831 (verified fixed) ... so I can't update at the moment.
I'd like to keep this ticket open for those issues to fully stabilize, and then see how the recent improvements work out. I'm thinking I can come back to this when there is a CLI 0.103+ and extension 0.5.75+.