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Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

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Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#151

Post by EGreg »

jeanlucas wrote: post #149

I was wondering why my local tool to inspect coding agent sessions stopped working in some cases. This is a really interesting engineering decision, I wonder how many people will want an encrypted external piece of instructions running on their machine.

It seems their incentives aren’t exactly aligned with their users, including corporate users. Look at the latest statements from Alex Karp, and now Satya Nadella etc.

Is this user-hostile? Encrypting stuff from the user is what RIAA used to do with DRM, worried about copyright infringement.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#152

Post by EGreg »

tpurves wrote: post #143
hansihe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems likely to me this was driven by the `ultra` mode in 5.6, which fans subagents to do work. This mode was previously only available in the web UI (what was previously known as pro?) It seems possible they trained this by doing full RL rollouts of agents interacting with each other. They likely view these prompts somewhat the same as raw reasoning traces, they don't want people to train directly on them. I am u…

"Latent space representation" I have been waiting for this moment in the evolution of AI. Well, waiting with some trepidation. It seems inevitable that frontier AI's will, at some point, leave behind human-comprehensible representations of language. Purely for functional reasons, it's going to start making sense for AI agents to communicate amongst themselves in much more efficient ways than borrowing the languages o…

I strongly believe that the future is the other way. New programming languages and environments designed for strong auditability and preventing bugs will dominate. Only bad actors will use latent space representation, and it might even be outlawed. But the bad actors will proliferate underground…

I actually built such a language: https://magarshak.com/U.html

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#153

Post by TowerTall »

tpurves wrote: post #143
hansihe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems likely to me this was driven by the `ultra` mode in 5.6, which fans subagents to do work. This mode was previously only available in the web UI (what was previously known as pro?) It seems possible they trained this by doing full RL rollouts of agents interacting with each other. They likely view these prompts somewhat the same as raw reasoning traces, they don't want people to train directly on them. I am u…

"Latent space representation" I have been waiting for this moment in the evolution of AI. Well, waiting with some trepidation. It seems inevitable that frontier AI's will, at some point, leave behind human-comprehensible representations of language. Purely for functional reasons, it's going to start making sense for AI agents to communicate amongst themselves in much more efficient ways than borrowing the languages o…

Google's AI just created its own universal 'language' (2016)

https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-language-create/

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#154

Post by embedding-shape »

patrickmcnamara wrote: post #67
pshirshov wrote: post #2

I wonder if they are gonna stop us from using gpt subscriptions in alternative harnesses. If not - that doesn't matter much, codex cli is a remarkably unremarkable harness.

Codex CLI not having a rewind makes it useless to me.

Heh, in another long-standing Codex issue I've been arguing against codex users who apparently don't know about git. Don't tell me you're yet another developer who refuses to pick up any sort of SCM?

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#156

Post by realusername »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #141
themgt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of insane though, you not only have dozens/hundreds of stochastic agents running on your machine, but you cannot even inspect the instructions those agents are working off of? I've gone in to look at Claude subagent/workflows and sometimes been like "no this was a mistake to spin up" ... Codex users just get to token yolo the encrypted telephone operator instructions+shell from orchestrator to subagents?

You already have an agent freely doing stuff on your machine. Subagents prompts are a weird place to draw a line. It's not like you're reading everything the agent is doing in any case, let's not kid ourselves.

> It's not like you're reading everything the agent is doing in any case

Personally I do, these tools aren't mature enough to be used without supervision

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#158

Post by karma_daemon »

tpurves wrote: post #143
hansihe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems likely to me this was driven by the `ultra` mode in 5.6, which fans subagents to do work. This mode was previously only available in the web UI (what was previously known as pro?) It seems possible they trained this by doing full RL rollouts of agents interacting with each other. They likely view these prompts somewhat the same as raw reasoning traces, they don't want people to train directly on them. I am u…

"Latent space representation" I have been waiting for this moment in the evolution of AI. Well, waiting with some trepidation. It seems inevitable that frontier AI's will, at some point, leave behind human-comprehensible representations of language. Purely for functional reasons, it's going to start making sense for AI agents to communicate amongst themselves in much more efficient ways than borrowing the languages o…

I've been thinking the same! Haha

Even for like token efficiency it could make sense - like imagine if the representation were more compact

Agents acn already translate languages quite well. It doesn't seem crazy that they could work and think in a model specific language, and then translate back to English or something for the user

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#159

Post by cbg0 »

pshirshov wrote: post #2

I wonder if they are gonna stop us from using gpt subscriptions in alternative harnesses. If not - that doesn't matter much, codex cli is a remarkably unremarkable harness.

There was a recent Twitter post from Tibo @ OpenAI asking someone to share how to run GPT on Claude Code so they don't seem to be against it.

Re: Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

#160

Post by embedding-shape »

aeon_ai wrote: post #133

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, b…

> this is not happening for sub-agent requests made in my own harness to other model providers treated as sub-agents.

Obviously it doesn't, how even could it? Read the issue description, it wouldn't make sense if something like that was possible, considering how it was implemented...

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