Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

What variant of Codex are you using?

CLI — 0.157.0, installed via npm install -g @openai/codex, Linux (WSL2)

What feature would you like to see?

Please make daemon_auto_start opt-in (default false) for the CLI, or at least ask once before turning it on.

Since 0.157.0, just opening an interactive codex session:

1. Starts a persistent background daemon (codex app-server --managed-daemon). It runs in its own session with no TTY and keeps running after every Codex window is closed (reparented to PID 1) until codex app-server daemon stop or a reboot.
2. Copies the whole platform package (~374 MB: codex, codex-code-mode-host, bundled bwrap/zsh/rg) into ~/.codex/packages/app-server-daemon/releases/<version>/ — byte-identical to what npm had just installed — and runs the daemon from that copy. From then on the backend's version is decoupled from the CLI version I installed with my package manager.
3. Starts a detached updater (codex app-server daemon pid-update-loop) that checks for updates 5 minutes after start and then hourly, downloads new releases and restarts the backend (which can kill active turns, see #40969).
4. Pins the environment of whichever session happened to start it. I launch Codex through a wrapper that sets HTTPS_PROXY per invocation; the daemon keeps the first session's proxy variables and its outbound connections go through that proxy, whatever later sessions are launched with. #42457 and #37537 (daemon cwd / terminal instead of the session's) look like the same root cause.

For a CLI, the least surprising default is that the backend lives and dies with the window, runs the binary I installed, and doesn't update itself in the background. A shared, self-updating daemon makes sense for Remote Control / the desktop app, so it would be fine to enable it there, or when the user explicitly runs codex app-server daemon start / bootstrap.

If it stays on by default, please at least:

• exit an auto-started daemon when its last client disconnects;
• not copy/self-update when the CLI was installed by a package manager (npm/brew/pacman) — run the installed binary instead (#41188, #46468, #48050).

Additional information

Bug found while turning it off: codex app-server daemon stop stops the app-server but leaves the pid-update-loop updater running (still alive 70 s later, had to kill it manually).

Workaround I'm using:

codex features disable daemon_auto_start
codex app-server daemon stop
pkill -f 'app-server daemon pid-update-loop'   # not stopped by `daemon stop`
rm -rf ~/.codex/packages/app-server-daemon

With the flag off, a new TUI session no longer spawns a daemon.

Related: #40969, #41188, #46468, #48050, #42457, #37537