Hooks stop firing after rate-limit stops or live hooks.json edits

What variant of Codex are you using?

CLI / TUI

Which version are you using?

codex-cli 0.128.0

What operating system are you using?

• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on WSL2
• Kernel: 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2
• Node: v22.22.0
• npm: 11.12.1

Bug description

Hooks can stop firing in a live Codex session under two conditions:

1. When Codex hits a rate limit and stops, the expected lifecycle hook does not appear to run.
2. When hooks.json is edited while Codex is already running, hooks stop firing entirely for the remainder of that session.

This is more severe than hooks not hot-reloading. After a live hooks.json update, the session appears to lose hook execution altogether. The only reliable workaround I have found is to restart the Codex session.

The hook configuration file is valid JSON. In the affected workspace, the repo-local hook file exists at .codex/hooks.json, and jq validates it successfully.

Expected behavior

For rate-limit stops:

• The appropriate stop/session lifecycle hook should still run when Codex stops because of a rate limit, or Codex should explicitly document and surface that hooks are skipped for that stop reason.
• Hook-driven cleanup, logging, or continuation workflows should not fail silently.

For live hooks.json edits, one of these behaviors would be acceptable:

• Keep using the previously loaded hook configuration until the session restarts.
• Hot-reload the updated hook configuration safely.
• Detect the change, report that hooks require a restart, and keep the previous working hook set active.

What should not happen is that all hooks silently stop firing for the rest of the live session.

Actual behavior

Observed behavior:

• After a rate-limit stop, the stop-related hook does not appear to run.
• After modifying hooks.json during an active session, no hooks appear to run again in that session, even though the resulting hooks.json remains valid JSON.
• Restarting Codex/session restores hook behavior.

Steps to reproduce

Scenario A: rate-limit stop

1. Configure a simple hook that produces a visible side effect, such as appending a timestamp to a temporary log file.
2. Start a long-running Codex CLI/TUI session with hooks enabled.
3. Continue working until Codex hits a rate limit and stops.
4. Check whether the stop/session lifecycle hook ran.

Scenario B: live hooks.json edit

1. Configure a simple hook that appends to a temporary log file on each relevant event.
2. Start a Codex CLI/TUI session and verify the hook fires.
3. Edit .codex/hooks.json while the session is still running. Keep the file syntactically valid.
4. Continue the same session and trigger more hook events.
5. Observe that hooks no longer fire until the Codex session is restarted.

Impact

This breaks long-running workflows that rely on hooks for:

• cleanup after stop/session lifecycle events
• logging and audit traces
• user-defined guardrails
• continuation or handoff generation when a run stops unexpectedly

The failure mode is particularly costly because it is silent. The user may assume the hook-based workflow is still active when it is not.

Related issues

Possibly related, but not the same failure mode:

• #17636 requests hot-reloading hook configuration during a live session.
• #17532 reports repo-local hooks not firing in interactive sessions.
• #18607 mentions missing Stop / SessionStop hooks in codex exec.

This report is specifically about hooks becoming non-functional in an existing CLI/TUI session after a rate-limit stop or after editing hooks.json during the live session.

Additional notes

A robust fix could be either:

• keep the previous validated hook registry active until restart,
• hot-reload hooks transactionally only after successful validation,
• or surface a clear warning/error when hooks are disabled or skipped.