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Codex Issues / #5983

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

Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Oct 30, 2025 by robertmsale Closed Jan 20, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (guidedways, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

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!

View original on GitHub ↗

4 Comments

guidedways contributor · 9 months ago

@robertmsale you can do this already somewhat with --config developer_instructions="...."

I do this to create multiple 'profiles' (the profile config feature itself does not support specifying different developer_instructions) and this way am able to add additional context. So your workflow would be:

1) Setup AGENTS.md with baseline instructions
2) Add anything you want to developer_instructions separately

This way you only have the core instructions in AGENTS.md while developer_instructions drives everything else on top. I have setup aliases within .zshrc with separate instructions for the separate profiles I use.

This works wonderfully.

steve-a-jones · 9 months ago

@guidedways I'm attempting to do something similar but not having success with the developer_instructions argument. Are you passing this when you run codex exec or when you start a repl? If you don't mind sharing a full example that would be greatly appreciated :)

guidedways contributor · 9 months ago

@steve-a-jones done, please find a tutorial here: https://github.com/openai/codex/discussions/7296

robertmsale · 9 months ago
@robertmsale you can do this already somewhat with --config developer_instructions="...."

Gotcha, so I guess my feature request is to simply --bypass-agents or something of that nature. I've been doing stuff like

#!/usr/bin/env bash

echo "" > ~/.codex/AGENTS.override.md
echo "" > "$PWD/AGENTS.override.md"
codex
rm "$PWD/AGENTS.override.md"
rm ~/.codex/AGENTS.override.md

Simply so I'm not deleting or renaming AGENTS.md, but just making sure those files do not load. It would be nice to opt-in to not loading them.