First message in fresh session consumes ~100k input tokens immediatly, no matter how trivial the input
Resolved 💬 6 comments Opened Apr 19, 2026 by afolkest Closed Apr 24, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex CLI is running?
0.121.0
What subscription do you have?
Pro
Which model were you using?
gpt-5.4 xhigh and gpt-5.3-codex-spark high
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 24.6.0 arm64 arm
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
iTerm2
What issue are you seeing?
Whenever I open a fresh Codex session and send a simple message, it consumes about 102k-105k tokens immediately.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Input:codex exec "Say hello world"
Output:
OpenAI Codex v0.121.0 (research preview)
--------
workdir: <redacted>
model: gpt-5.4
provider: openai
approval: never
sandbox: workspace-write [workdir, /tmp, $TMPDIR, /Users/<redacted>/.codex/memories]
reasoning effort: xhigh
reasoning summaries: none
session id: 019da3a1-d1d5-7a22-950b-3839f72b8e20
--------
user
Say hello world
codex
hello world
tokens used
105,156<img width="1191" height="376" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5a2155b4-2d2a-4f46-b80e-2cde4b9c67cd" />
What is the expected behavior?
_No response_
Additional information
_No response_
6 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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You must have a very large AGENTS.md or a large number of MCPs. You should look at the rollout file (you can ask codex to find it for you under ~/.codex/sessions).
When I try to repro the problem (with relatively few MCPs and a minimal AGENTS.md file), I see a value of about 22K tokens usage for the first prompt.
I reproduced this issue in a freshly initialized empty repo with no AGENTS.md and with my MCPs removed from Codex.
I went ahead and downgraded Codex to 0.115 and the problem is gone. Looking at the rollout file I see nothing corresponding to 100k tokens.
The issue showed up immediately after upgrade to 0.121 with no other changes in my setup.
Could it be the "memories" feature? I noticed that after enabling "memories", codex tries to summarize past sessions into memories, which consumed a lot of tokens. The
raw_memories.mdis also 3.4k+ lines, which seems to be too long to be injected in context. I have to disable the memories feature entirely.@afolkest, are you still seeing this with the latest version of the CLI? We did discover a regression that made it in to 0.121 that could have explained what you were seeing. We fixed it shortly after, and the fix was in 0.122.0 and all subsequent versions.
@etraut-openai It appears to be fixed now! Many thanks for getting back to me.