CodexHacks

Tip, Tricks, and Hacks for OpenAI Codex CLI https://github.com/openai/codex/

List all previous sessions

codex resume

Session data files

Sessions are stored at ~/.codex/sessions/YYYY/MM/DD/

You can then fairly easily find your session and manage it.

Delete a session

Example:

% codex resume
Resume a previous session
Type to search
  Created         Updated         Conversation
> 47 minutes ago  39 minutes ago  You are in the folder of a decompiled "com.blackmagicdesign.android.blackmagiccam" app.
  59 minutes ago  55 minutes ago  You are in the folder of a decompiled "com.blackmagicdesign.android.blackmagiccam" app.
  4 hours ago     4 hours ago     can you see **just the code that I have staged for commiting**?
...

I want to delete the 2nd one from today (2025/10/10)

% ls -la ~/.codex/sessions/2025/10/10/
total 752
drwxr-xr-x@ 7 pv  staff     224 Oct 10 11:04 .
drwxr-xr-x@ 9 pv  staff     288 Oct 10 07:10 ..
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pv  staff   34810 Oct 10 07:13 rollout-2025-10-10T07-10-52-0199ce75-d3d0-7140-bb15-482a79f42452.jsonl
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pv  staff     904 Oct 10 10:21 rollout-2025-10-10T10-21-45-0199cf24-9501-7700-b4f0-057fb0d0a6a3.jsonl
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pv  staff     928 Oct 10 10:51 rollout-2025-10-10T10-51-42-0199cf40-02a4-7eb0-9dca-ba7897e8afad.jsonl
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pv  staff    6025 Oct 10 10:56 rollout-2025-10-10T10-52-43-0199cf40-efb9-7ce1-a75e-a8f77d0f5a50.jsonl
-rw-r--r--@ 1 pv  staff  317570 Oct 10 11:12 rollout-2025-10-10T11-04-34-0199cf4b-c7fd-74b2-b50f-dbe863b32256.jsonl

% rm ~/.codex/sessions/2025/10/10/rollout-2025-10-10T10-52-43-0199cf40-efb9-7ce1-a75e-a8f77d0f5a50.jsonl

% codex resume
Resume a previous session
Type─to─search
  Created         Updated         Conversation
> 51 minutes ago  43 minutes ago  You are in the folder of a decompiled "com.blackmagicdesign.android.blackmagiccam" app.T
  4 hours ago     4 hours ago     can you see **just the code that I have staged for commiting**?
  20 hours ago    13 hours ago    Build a modern system-event ingestion module that emits display (on/off/unlock), device boot/...
...│

Use OpenAI API Key

aka: Toggle your auth type between chatgpt or apikey

If you reach your ChatGPT account's weekly limit then you can switch over to using OPENAI_API_KEY.

There are several real-world usability problems with this though:

1. If you reached the ChatGPT limit while in a [chatgpt auth] session (which might be almost always) then you cannot resume that session in an apikey auth session.
   See issues:
   • openai/codex#2478
   • openai/codex#4065
   • ...
2. You cannot easily tell from the codex resume list what auth a previous session used.

With that in mind, you can change your auth from chatgpt to apikey and start fresh sessions.

The process to do this is documented ok at https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/docs/authentication.md.

But I followed the directions and [surprise] it still did not work... because I was running into the above issues by trying to resume a "chatgpt" authed session.

Here are my steps to go from chatgpt auth to apikey auth:

1. Obtain your OpenAI API Key from either wherever you keep it or get a new one from https://platform.openai.com/api-keys.
   The API Key needs to have permission Responses API /v1/responses = Write.
2. export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-proj-..."
3. printenv OPENAI_API_KEY | codex login --with-api-key
4. codex and enter a fresh prompt and it should work.

To go back from apikey auth to chatgpt auth:

1. rm ~/.codex/auth.json
2. codex login
3. codex and enter a fresh prompt and it should work

Ideas

• Someone should write an app that manages (rename, delete, etc) the sessions!