Deleting files without permission

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 23, 2026 by siddsach Closed Apr 23, 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?

0.124.0

What subscription do you have?

plus

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.4

What platform is your computer?

_No response_

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

_No response_

What issue are you seeing?

In a fresh Codex session on April 23, 2026, I asked: "make a slide deck based on the pdf in this directory." The agent inspected the directory, found rolnick24a.pdf and an
existing slides.html, then issued an apply_patch that deleted slides.html outright before recreating it. I did not ask it to delete the file or authorize destructive changes. After I objected, it restored the
file. This is unsafe default behavior: existing user files should not be deleted as part of a normal edit flow.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

idk

What is the expected behavior?

Expected behavior: in-place edits by default; no delete-first replacement of existing files; explicit confirmation before destructive operations.

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 4 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

  • #18840
  • #18511
  • #18106
  • #17460

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etraut-openai contributor · 4 months ago

Thanks for the bug report. We'll share the feedback with the team responsible for training our codex models. If you see other model behavior that you'd like to report, please use the /feedback command. That will provide us with additional details including logs and conversation text.