Codex fails to start/initialize in some directory trees
What version of the IDE extension are you using?
26.304.20706
What subscription do you have?
plus
Which IDE are you using?
VS code 1.110.0
What platform is your computer?
Linux 6.19.5-1-default x86_64 x86_64
What issue are you seeing?
In general there seems to be no issue to start codex in a directory that contains a large number of files or big files or several directory trees. However, when adding a particular tree, Codex will not finish to initialize itself - I just get the sidebar window (activity bar?) with title CODEX and a moving "slider", nothing else. It can run for hours with no progress and no message/error whatsoever. It doesn't react to ^C or anything. I can still exit code normally with no apparent leftover process.
If I move this tree away, start VS/code and codex, it starts normally. Then I can move it back and it doesn't seem to hurt. Just during codex startup this directory tree must not be present.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
I only observed this if this particular directory tree is in the startup directory - I cannot tell what exactly is wrong with it. Since that's >1GB and proprietary, I can't share it.
What is the expected behavior?
normal startup regardless of the files in the startup directory
Additional information
The startup folder contains several subfolders for related subprojects which I want to keep together, and I want codex to be aware of them. Some folders may contain generated data (many GB, thousands of files), some may contain tarballs (many GB), all have no problem. The problematic one contains a ROS workspace (Python, C, yaml, etc. with about 1.5GB - it also includes a few binary files (robot HW drivers, some generated .so files, and some executable shell scripts).
The issue is not specific to a particular VS code, Codex, Model, Kernel etc., but apparently due to something special with the folder that gets scanned/processed in an ugly way at a time where I don't expect any interaction with the files yet.
I can try to dig into this and remove part by part of this problematic tree to isolate it, but the main problem is that I still need some kind of debug functionality to get a clue. How can I make the Codex extension verbose?
4 Comments
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I managed to find a strange workaround... If I start code and immediately after start codex before code is half-way initialized, it fails fast. However, a few seconds later while code is still running all kind of startup tasks, codex will in parallel load and start up fine. If I wait until code is idle before I start codex, it will not load anymore. I also observed that code will keep one core at 100%, but this behavior is unrelated to the presence of the problematic directory tree.
After installing the codex CLI, I can also add that the CLI does not suffer from this issue. It's just the VS code extension.
...however, despite it completes loading the activity bar, I can't resume any chat because it will hang again, this time with a spinning circle. Moving the problematic tree away makes it responsive again when started in this strange way :-S
The "open chat" panel lists previous chats and I can click on one to open it in the editor, but it also won't open anything if this tree is present, but it will work when it is removed
I could isolate the build directory within that tree to be the problematic one, which is only ~50MB with some cmake stuff. However, just copying the build tree into my startup directory does not cause the issue. I need some output from the addon to understand what is going on