codex in vscode does not respect any change to config.toml
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Dec 13, 2025 by orazdow Closed Dec 13, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What version of Codex is running?
0.64.0-alpha.10
What subscription do you have?
pro
Which model were you using?
5.1-codex-max
What platform is your computer?
windows
What issue are you seeing?
I need codex to make edits only with approval, not automatically, so I edited config.toml to: approval_policy = "untrusted".
Even after creating a new agent and rebooting windows codex in vscode will always make edits without asking for approval. It reports that its approval policy is still "on-request", and any advice asked of it leads to hallucinated vscode settings that are not available. Shouldn't it be possible to change such an important setting?
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Use of the vscode extension. The exe used directly outside of vscode does respect the config.
What is the expected behavior?
_No response_
Additional information
_No response_
4 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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The extension provides a popup menu for adjusting this. Look for a robot icon beneath the prompt text input. You can select between "Chat" (read only), "Agent" and "Agent (full access)". If you want to tell the agent to treat your code as read-only, then select "Chat". The model will then generally not attempt to make any changes. If it is pressed to make a change, it will ask you to approve before doing so.
You can also make changes to config.toml, but you need to reload the extension after any such change.
That setting for access mode not the same as approval_policy, so this does not answer the question. What method of reloading the extension are you referring to that should make the config.toml settings work, could you kindly elaborate?
Edit: the newer version of the codex extension , now has a "custom" option and this does respect the toml so this is resolved.