ability not to use "system role" in the prompt

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Jul 24, 2025 by Tamir-Schwarz Closed Sep 5, 2025

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (pakrym-oai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Hi!
im using an internal model that not support system role.

is there a way to configure codex-cli not to use this role on the prompt?

3 Comments

imajes · 1 year ago

You could just clone the repository locally, edit the file codex-rs/core/prompt.md, removing all content, and then build the rust code. This would essentially give you an empty set of 'system' instructions.

The responses api path basically combines those with any user submitted instructions, and seems to pass them just as instructions in the request payload... so assuming the model you are using conforms to that API, it'll just receive empty instructions, and ignore them.

If you need to not pass an instructions key at all, you'll need to edit stream_responses (or similar for chat completion) to remove that key from the payload.

navanchauhan · 1 year ago

Changing codex-rs/core/prompt.md results in 🖐 unexpected status 400 Bad Request: {"detail":"Instructions are not valid"}

pakrym-oai contributor · 11 months ago

No, unfortunately there is currently no way to have chat completion model without a system message.