Distractions started appearing in codex 80
Resolved 💬 4 comments Opened Jan 10, 2026 by akfaew Closed Jan 11, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Instead of showing an empty prompt, codex now shows something like:
› Improve documentation in @filename
This is very distracting. Is it possible to disable this? It adds no value.
4 Comments
This is intended to help new users of codex who are not sure how to get started. If you're an experienced user, you can ignore this.
@etraut-openai I can't ignore it, it's bright and keeps appearing and disappearing. It's doing everything possible to not be ignored. Can you check the modification date of ~/.codex, add a flag, or do anything at all? Someone is a new user for 10 minutes, but a non-new user for the rest of his life, surely you see this.
@etraut-openai I thought you must see a different view than I, as it is inconceivable to me that anyone would find this desirable:
<img width="568" height="183" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/25c2146c-ebd1-406b-bd92-dacfa3f23e94" />
I can't even see the cursor to know which window is the active one.
Claude at least shows useful prompt suggestions. It would be better to show no suggestion at all, rather than a random and misleading one.