What is the purpose of the "Approval presets" section?
Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Sep 8, 2025 by DanKaplanSES Closed Sep 8, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (aibrahim-oai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What is the type of issue?
Documentation is confusing
What is the issue?
The Approval Presets page says:
Codex provides three main Approval Presets: - Read Only: Codex can read files and answer questions; edits, running commands, and network access require approval. - Auto: Codex can read files, make edits, and run commands in the workspace without approval; asks for approval outside the workspace or for network access. - Full Access: Full disk and network access without prompts; extremely risky. You can further customize how Codex runs at the command line using the --ask-for-approval and --sandbox options.
- This information seems redundant to me, but I probably don't understand:
--ask-for-approvaland--sandboxare fully documented earlier. - I don't understand how to set/use these presets, which one is default, or how they differ from the flags mentioned in the last sentence.
- The page doesn't use the word "preset" anywhere else.
npx --yes @openai/codex@latest help | grep -i 'preset'doesn't find anything.
Should this section be removed?
Where did you find it?
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/docs/config.md#approval-presets
2 Comments
Those are the presets that shows on
/approvalsin the tui.@aibrahim-oai If possible, I'd like to request reopening this:
/approvalsconfig.tomlsetting.--ask-for-approvaland--sandbox. Is each preset synonymous to a combination of those flags? I'm inferring otherwise, because the last sentence says (emphasis mine), "You can further customize how Codex runs [by using the flags]". It may help to document that.