Codex Desktop silently ignores project trust requirement

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.313.41514(1043)

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.3.0 arm64 arm (Apple Silicon)

What issue are you seeing?

Codex Desktop silently ignored my project-local .codex/config.toml because the project was not marked as trusted, but it never prompted me to trust the folder.

This made the issue very hard to diagnose. From the user perspective, project-local settings such as sandbox_workspace_write.writable_roots appeared to do nothing, and there was no visible in-context warning in the active thread or when opening the workspace.

The only place where this was surfaced was in the Settings menu, which made the real cause easy to miss during normal use.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Create a project with a project-local .codex/config.toml.
2. Add a setting that should have a visible effect, for example sandbox_workspace_write.writable_roots.
3. Open the project in Codex Desktop without marking the project as trusted.
4. Start a thread and try to use behavior that depends on the project-local config.
5. Observe that the project-local config appears to be ignored.
6. Notice that Codex Desktop does not prompt the user to trust the folder.
7. Open Settings and observe that the project trust/config issue is only surfaced there.

What is the expected behavior?

If Codex Desktop refuses to load project-local .codex/config.toml because the project is not trusted, it should clearly prompt the user to trust the folder.

At minimum, it should show a visible warning in the active workspace or thread explaining that the project-local config was ignored because the folder is not trusted.

Additional information

In my case, this was especially confusing because project-local settings appeared broken even though the real cause was the trust state of the project.

The issue was not obvious during normal use because Codex Desktop did not show a trust prompt and did not clearly explain in the main workflow that the local config had been skipped.

The underlying reason only became clear after checking Settings, where Codex reported that the project-local config would only be loaded if the folder was added as a trusted project.