App permissions change to 'custom' and causes read-only mode
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 18, 2026 by BlueBlazin Closed Feb 18, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?
26.217.1959 (669)
What subscription do you have?
Pro
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 25.2.0 arm64 arm
What issue are you seeing?
Whenever Codex is launched, the permissions dropdown is set to "Custom (config.toml)" instead of "Default permissions".
This is what my config.toml looks like:
model = "gpt-5.3-codex"
model_reasoning_effort = "xhigh"
approval_policy = "never"However, the model complains about being unable to make edits because it is in read-only mode. Changing permissions back to "Default permissions" fixes this.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Launch Codex app(26.217.1959 (669)) and try running commands.
What is the expected behavior?
App shouldn't be in read-only mode? This was not an issue before this update.
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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This is because you've selected
approval_policy = "never"which means "never ask me to approve a command, always fail it if it violates sandbox policies". Is there a reason you have configured this option? Try commenting out that line in your config file, and see if that works more to your liking.That second part is new to me. Was that always the case? I remember I used this option from the UI back when that was a thing you could do and I don't remember the tooltip / description mentioning this. The option to set this seems to have disappeared from the UI now.
Anyway, I'll remove it but it still remains that this was not an issue before and now it is. Thanks!