›_ Codex Issues
Codex Issues / #2348

Sandbox breaks coding and debug abilities

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Aug 15, 2025 by matssk Closed Nov 10, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex is running?

_No response_

Which model were you using?

_No response_

What platform is your computer?

_No response_

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Because of the sandbox it often gets confused and cannot figure out things related to databases, kafka and other "network" connected things, even if it's a test database or just locally. It keeps running around in circles because of something in the system prompt related to the sandbox and network access, which prevents it from being efficient at debugging and writing code. It for example often refuses to run tests, especially integration tests, when the sandbox is on and just generally keeps doing weird stuff. It seems there is something about the system prompt that makes it think it just completely have to avoid anything network related including local database calls and it spends a lot of time trying to get around this rather than asking for permission.

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

What do you see instead?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

matssk · 1 year ago

It also makes it lazy. It frequency doesn't want to do things and will say it is not possible in this environment etc and is often hesistant to run tests and commands and tries to find workaround that are less efficient, to avoid running commands or tests.

etraut-openai contributor · 9 months ago

Thanks for the bug report. We've shared the feedback with the team members who are responsible for training our codex models. We're tracking this feedback and similar reports so we can make the model more robust in future iterations.

If you see other model behavior that you'd like to report, please use the recently-added /feedback command in the CLI. That will provide us with additional details including logs and conversation text.