Ability to bypass/disable AGENTS.md pipeline (CLI)

Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Oct 30, 2025 by robertmsale Closed Jan 20, 2026

What feature would you like to see?

This is a two-part feature.

  1. Ability to disable AGENTS chain loading completely with CLI argument
  2. Ability to offer alternative

For example:

codex --bypass-agents
codex --bypass-agents "$(cat alternative.md)"

Additional information

I think this would be very handy for a number of reasons.

  1. Helps with troubleshooting AGENTS pipeline
  2. Allows for auditing such as "explain how this feature is implemented, compare to AGENTS.md description" (Codex not pre-loaded with potentially inaccurate info, draws own conclusions)
  3. Enables switching out personas, or customizing load order by concatenating different files on launch (less janky than renaming AGENTS.md to something else, renaming something else to AGENTS.md and launching; adding/deleting AGENTS.override.md to switch personas)

Only thing I'm not sure about is how the project_doc_max_bytes would work with an override - whether it obeys truncation rules or not. I look forward to discussing the details, if anyone else is interested of course!

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