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Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

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Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#131

Post by braebo »

embedding-shape wrote: post #89
jiayo wrote: post #80

If we're viewing this as a _bad_ thing, I don't really see that it is any different than how Claude encrypts it's thinking. Take a peek at your ~/.claude jsonl files. You're sending thinking ciphertext back and forth to Anthropic. Presumably the thinking is either considered proprietary, or, more likely, leaks embarrassing or confidential information.

> I don't really see that it is any different than how Claude encrypts it's thinking. Take a peek at your ~/.claude jsonl files. You're sending thinking ciphertext back and forth to Anthropic. I was already only using Claude Code to double-check if it's getting better than Codex, but with things like this, it really isn't even an alternative. What's the point of using a reasoning model if you as an end-user can't see…

GPT 5.6 is like Fable minus Opus plus down syndrome.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#133

Post by aeon_ai »

In my tests, as of this morning on the latest Codex SDK, this is not happening for sub-agent requests made in my own harness to other model providers treated as sub-agents.

Specifically, I use Opus and others for subagent execution to get alloyed properties on the workflow, and as far as I can tell, that's not affected.

Presumably, this is to hide optimizations they might be making to their own subagent processing, but that's a losing, dumb battle to fight, and misses the forest for the trees.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#134

Post by bartread »

dmurray wrote: post #79
bartread wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine this will be because a decent chunk of the IP in Codex is probably within its prompts, how they're built, and how they're sequenced and orchestrated, rather than in the codebase per se. We had this discussion a few months ago where we talked about allowing people to choose an AI provider and provide their API key, thinking about enterprises with "preferred" (read: mandated) AI suppliers. We also wanted to o…

Perhaps AI providers should support this natively: the customer supplies the API key but doesn't get access to the transcripts.

I don't know how you'd enforce that unless it was something you could mandate at the level of the API call, and then the API call is rejected if the customer hasn't configured it for "no transcript".

It sort of feels like an area of friction even still.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#135

Post by anon373839 »

hyperbovine wrote: post #124
postalcoder wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also not the first time Codex started encrypting stuff. Their excellent compaction endpoint has served up a giant encrypted blob since at least five months ago.

Feels strongly like we're in the late-stage-AI-unicorn phase. If this is really their moat then the Chinese companies will win.

This and the overly stylized model names. Mythos? Sol? Please, it's another version bump.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#136

Post by bartread »

agumonkey wrote: post #116
hnlmorg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with your divinity spell comparison but unfortunately there is a lot of value in the prompts because these spells are the “programming languages” of LLMs.

yeah i get it too, i'm just flabbergasted that this is today's market it reminds me of the pre-vulkan game programming days.. drivers were black boxes, game developpers had to resort to magic tricks to do stuff, until everybody got fed up and wanted some logical ground to operate

It's a brave new world, etc., isn't it?

One does find oneself slightly askance at one's own thinking sometimes, that's for sure.

But I suppose, is it really so different? I mean, back in the day moreso than now, a lot of the valuable IP in any system was in the design and specification of that system - the problems usually solved within the design and specificaion (use X algorithm, etc.) - and the code was "just" the implementation of those solutions.

So perhaps it's more of a regression in some ways: the value is in the specification (the prompt) once again.

Your point about stochastic behaviour is well made though, and there is no way to 100% guarantee or formally verify the behaviour of a system that relies on an underlying technology whose behaviour is fundamentally stochastic.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#137

Post by embedding-shape »

braebo wrote: post #131
embedding-shape wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really see that it is any different than how Claude encrypts it's thinking. Take a peek at your ~/.claude jsonl files. You're sending thinking ciphertext back and forth to Anthropic. I was already only using Claude Code to double-check if it's getting better than Codex, but with things like this, it really isn't even an alternative. What's the point of using a reasoning model if you as an end-user can't see…

GPT 5.6 is like Fable minus Opus plus down syndrome.

Insightful.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#139

Post by [deleted] »

bigbaguette wrote: post #62
flexagoon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but also store data and sell to whoever is training I see this as an argument against using them/Chinese models all the time, but I don't get it. I totally understand wanting to keep your data private if you're using an LLM for personal chats. But coding? I'm not working for the military, I'd gladly donate my codebase to Chinese labs if that means they can keep releasing 6-months-behind level models for 100x cheape…

When you work on proprietary code with a lot of trade secrets contained in it, on a codebase that did cost millions of dollars of man-hours to build and that holds the company's IP, you tend to be very careful where you're sending that to.

[deleted]

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#140

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #17
londons_explore wrote: post #14

I assume this is mostly to frustrate efforts to proxy large numbers of user requests and responses and use it to train competitor models.

Quite obviously they're afraid of letting other providers see how they handle the whole multi-agent management stuff. Pretty terrible implementation though, which makes it impossible to use the multi-agent stuff as a paying user, as you have zero recourse in figuring out what went wrong, when something inevitably goes wrong.

[deleted]
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