OpenAI's Codex CLI quietly installs a background daemon, and once it's running it stays running, updating itself without being asked.
A GitHub issue filed against the openai/codex repository, numbered 48195, reports that the CLI sets up a background process on every install, one that keeps running after the session ends and fetches its own updates without a prompt. The report reached Hacker News, where it gathered 79 points and 31 comments, fast traction for a bug report rather than a feature launch.
This matters because coding agent tools are increasingly shipping infrastructure once reserved for consumer apps: auto-updaters, background services, processes that run with or without your attention. That might be a reasonable tradeoff for faster reconnects, but bundling it into a default install without surfacing it clearly echoes complaints that have dogged other developer tools' opt-out telemetry for years. A CLI that keeps a process alive on your machine after you've closed it is a bigger ask than installing a library, and it deserves to be flagged as one.
Calling a background daemon a convenience feature doesn't make it less of a background daemon.