The sprites base image installs the codex CLI without its companion binary codex-code-mode-host

Questions / Help
1

The base image installs the codex CLI (0.151.0) without its companion binary
codex-code-mode-host. Starting with codex ~0.151, the bundled model catalog marks the whole
gpt-5.6 family (gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, gpt-5.6-luna) as tool_mode: code_mode_only.
In that mode every tool call goes through codex-code-mode-host, which codex spawns from the
directory beside its own binary. The file isn’t there, so every tool call fails and codex can’t
run a single command in the sprite with any gpt-5.6 model. Older models (e.g. gpt-5.1) still
work because they aren’t in the catalog and get the plain shell tool.

Any agent that runs codex in a sprite with a gpt-5.6 model has no working tools. It can’t read or
edit files, so it produces confident but empty output instead of an error. The CLI exits 0.

2

Thanks for the report. You’re right. I recently changed how we were managing upgrades on these agents and broke this install. These agents change how they are installed very often and my plan doesn’t work well in that situation.

We have a fix for this in place which will be released to Sprites soon. It will always install with the full installers and should keep them up to date more easily as well. I don’t have a timeline for that release but it should be soon.

You should be able to install codex from the installer and then modify your path to use that new binary instead of the pre-installed one.

If you want to experiment, I tried this on a Sprite and had success getting the newest working Codex. You may want to just move or rename instead of deleting. You could also create a Sprite checkpoint before doing this so you can easily go back if it doesn’t work as expected.

# Remove the old launcher; this leaves ~/.codex settings and login intact.
rm -f "$HOME/.local/bin/codex"

# Install the complete official package into the user's local directory.
npm install --global --prefix "$HOME/.local" --include=optional @openai/codex@latest

# Prefer this installation and clear the shell's cached command location.
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
hash -r

codex --version
readlink "$HOME/.local/bin/codex"

The final command should point into ../lib/node_modules/@openai/codex/, rather than sprite-agents.

Then start a fresh session:

"$HOME/.local/bin/codex"
3

The workaround works, though not applicable for our application as the sprite we run is locked for access to npm.

Awaiting the next release to fix this.