Codex starts encrypting sub-agent prompts

Post by realusername » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

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.

Post by b40d-48b2-979e » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #162

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.

[flagged]

    training people to believe that them having impossible to inspect encrypted channels from
    your machines to theirs is a best practice

Post by pornel » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #151

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.

Post by mparramon » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

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…

  zero-graph v1
  origin source-text
  module "hello"
  hash "graph:a7f7e6899a73f3b4"

  node #decl_ad8d9028 Function name:"main" type:"Void" public:true fallible:true
  node #param_4610ae76 Param name:"world" type:"World"
  node #expr_c403020c MethodCall name:"write" type:"Void"
  node #expr_653eeb6e Literal type:"String" value:"hello from zero\n"
  edge #expr_c403020c arg #expr_653eeb6e order:0

Post by realusername » Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

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.