Skills: hard budget limit (5440 chars) with no exclude/disable mechanism causes mass description truncation

Open 💬 1 comment Opened May 24, 2026 by lz-lunzi

Environment

  • Codex: v0.133.0
  • OS: macOS 26.5 (25F71)
  • Model: auto (9router)

Problem

Codex unconditionally loads ALL skills from multiple directories with a hard budget limit of 5440 chars (~2% context window). No config option to exclude or disable unwanted skills. When skill count exceeds ~20, mass description truncation occurs.

Evidence

From ~/.codex/log/codex-tui.log:

truncated skill metadata to fit skills context budget
  budget_limit=5440
  total_skills=119
  included_skills=119
  omitted_skills=0
  truncated_description_chars_per_skill=232
  truncated_skill_descriptions=103

Root Cause

  1. Unconditional multi-directory scan — Codex scans ~/.codex/skills/, ~/.codex/skills/.system/, and ~/.agents/skills/ with no filter
  2. No exclude/ignore configconfig.toml has no [skills] section, no mechanism to disable unwanted skills
  3. .system/ auto-restore — imagegen, plugin-creator, skill-creator, skill-installer, openai-docs auto-restore on every launch, cannot be permanently removed
  4. Budget too small — 119 skills × ~232 chars = 103/119 descriptions truncated

Expected

  • skills.exclude = [...] or skills.include = [...] in config.toml
  • Per-skill enabled = false override
  • Option to disable .system/ skill auto-restore
  • OR dynamic budget that scales with context window size

Impact

Truncated descriptions make skills undiscoverable — agent cannot understand what most skills actually do. Users with many skills (agent frameworks, integrations) are hardest hit.

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