AGENTS.md is silently ignored when invalid utf8 characters are present
Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened May 18, 2026 by runfence Closed May 20, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex CLI is running?
0.130.0
What subscription do you have?
Pro
What platform is your computer?
Windows
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
Windows Terminal (PowerShell)
Codex doctor report
error: unexpected argument '--json' foundWhat issue are you seeing?
c:\Users\USERNAME\.codex\AGENTS.md is not injected into context after I accidentally put invalid utf8 characters into the text there.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Edit the file with wrong encoding, add some quotes that read as ? when opened back in utf8.
Uploaded thread: 019e38be-0085-7450-9591-5828b2035e64
What is the expected behavior?
c:\Users\USERNAME\.codex\AGENTS.md is injected into context, merged with project level AGENTS.md if exists. If invalid characters prevent this from working, a clear error message should show it.
3 Comments
Happened to me too. I just told Codex to find it, make sure it doesn't do it again, tell it to run a QA, RCA, and a smoke-test and it shouldn't resurface any issues back. Try and see if that works!
Updated the issue. Turns out the cause was invalid characters but no error message was shown.
Thanks for the bug report. This will be addressed in an upcoming version.