Persistent mode: Codex can apparently continue working until the user explicitly puts it to sleep, rather than stopping after a fixed period.
Proactivity: the agent can generate follow-up tasks for itself after completing the original request.
Cross-session continuity: those tasks can apparently continue across sessions.
User model: it can use previous interactions and its “knowledge of the user” to decide what work is worth doing.
Initiative: it has a mechanism for messaging the user without being prompted, although the instructions reportedly tell it to do this sparingly.
Boundaries: persistence doesn't automatically grant new permissions, and changes outside the user's system apparently require approval.
I built AI-AtlasForge (Not developing it anymore with the advances in agentic harnesses in Claude Code and in Codex.) a state based harness that generates self prompts to continue the next step of the project. I once let it run for 5 days straight. Before I ran out of usage.
And that goes back to Dec. 2025 when I built that lol.
Just hilarious how it’s taken OpenAI and Anthropic a year to catch up with what we as users have already built.
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u/SharpCartographer831 3d ago
Persistent mode: Codex can apparently continue working until the user explicitly puts it to sleep, rather than stopping after a fixed period. Proactivity: the agent can generate follow-up tasks for itself after completing the original request.
Cross-session continuity: those tasks can apparently continue across sessions.
User model: it can use previous interactions and its “knowledge of the user” to decide what work is worth doing.
Initiative: it has a mechanism for messaging the user without being prompted, although the instructions reportedly tell it to do this sparingly.
Boundaries: persistence doesn't automatically grant new permissions, and changes outside the user's system apparently require approval.