Codex ignores approval rejection messages
Open 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 14, 2026 by P0NYSLAYSTATION
💡 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)?
26.409.20454
What subscription do you have?
Pro +
What platform is your computer?
_No response_
What issue are you seeing?
When I reject an approval request for a command or code change, the agent does not seem to see my message or be aware that approval was rejected by the user. It consistently treats rejection as some kind of system error to be overcome and starts trying to find another way to do whatever it was doing or just resends the same action or code again.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Ask for a code change and get an approval request.
Type something in the "What do you want Codex to do differently" field and send.
What is the expected behavior?
The agent should be interrupted and receive the user rejection and message immediately instead of trying to complete the current action first. Anything else makes writing a rejection message a waste of time.
Additional information
_No response_
2 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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I am hitting this too. The rejection message entered in the “No / tell Codex what to do differently” flow is not delivered to the agent as part of the rejection. Codex first sees only that the approval was rejected, starts reasoning about fallback approaches, and only later receives my typed reason as a separate steer.
In some sessions, Codex has already looped or even wrapped up the conversation by the time my rejection reason arrives, so the “tell Codex what to do differently” field is effectively unusable.
Expected: reject + typed guidance should be delivered atomically, or Codex should pause after rejection until the guidance is available.
Actual: rejection is processed first, guidance arrives later as a separate steer.