Feature: Persist approval policy selection to config.toml
Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Dec 23, 2025 by Galaxy-0 Closed Mar 7, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Problem
Currently, when a user changes the approval policy via the TUI (e.g., selecting 'Full Auto', 'Read-Only', or 'Untrusted' from the Approvals menu), the change is only effective for the current session. Restarting Codex causes it to revert to the default setting.
Proposed Solution
We should persist these changes to config.toml so that the user's preference is remembered across sessions.
Implementation Details
This would likely involve:
- Adding a
set_approval_policymethod toConfigEditsBuilder. - Dispatching a persistence event (e.g.,
PersistAskForApprovalPolicy) when the user selects a preset in the TUI. - Updating the
Appevent handler to write the new policy to disk.
(Note: Implementation logic was explored in closed PR #8474)
2 Comments
You can explicitly specify a default approval policy selection in your config.toml today. As you note, the TUI provides a way to temporarily override this in cases where you'd like to do so. Persisting ephemeral approval mode switches to config.toml is probably not what most users would expect. I think we'd need to see really strong signal (lots of upvotes) to consider a change like this. We can leave the feature request open for a while, but if it doesn't get strong support, we'll close it.
If we were to change this behavior, we'd need to also consider the impact to other codex surfaces like the IDE extension. Although we're not always as diligent as we should be, we try to keep behaviors consistent across surfaces.
This feature request hasn't received enough upvotes, so I'm going to close it.