Request: monitor background services
Open 💬 7 comments Opened Aug 9, 2025 by aehlke
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Please add this feature: https://x.com/_catwu/status/1953926541370630538
Allows long builds or server runs to not block and allows the agent to inspect logs of the long running process or once it completes without blocking other tasks
7 Comments
This is much needed just ran into this when I asked it to start my API, just sat there watching the time in `Working 10s ..." go up without being able to do anything else 😅.
More context on use cases: https://x.com/steipete/status/1954594876743389444
Closing in favor of #3663
I previously closed this as a duplicate, but I'm going to reopen because this has received more upvotes than the other one.
I'd love something like this so I could do something like
"ok do a test install & watch the log", then go & do stuff & have my interactive codex session see & respond to exceptions in the log. The mechanical "see error->copy-error/point-agent-at-error->ask for fix" loop gets monotonous & motivation-sucking.
I can easily setup an exec loop—but then I lose the interaction & ability to steer.
Still no monitor? Token usage during long running tasks constant validation is severe.
I built roughly this as an agent-callable tool and have been running it. It is a feature-gated
monitortool with three actions: start (give it a shell command to run as a background watcher, like a dev server or a long build), list (see what is currently being watched), and stop. When the watched command prints output, that line wakes the session, so the agent can launch a server, keep working, and react the moment the log shows it came up or crashed, without sitting and blocking on it. It is live in my own Codex (CLI and Desktop) with tests behind the flag. Reference branch: https://github.com/openai/codex/compare/rust-v0.142.0...yaanfpv:codex:monitor-tool, full design in #29922, and #22003 is the broader hub for this capability. Glad to turn it into a PR if there is appetite.