Codex

An email popped up in my inbox today: “You can just build things, enjoy 6 months on us.” Sender: the Codex team at OpenAI. The first line, in big letters: “You’re in.” Then: “Thanks for maintaining open source projects.” I stared at that line three times and couldn’t help laughing out loud. Free ride: secured A while back I filled out their Codex for Open Source application on a whim. Didn’t expect much — I just listed the PRs I’d submitted to context-mode, plus my own byf and dev-skills.

Codex talks to the ChatGPT backend over WebSocket by default. If your network path involves Clash, a corporate proxy, cross-border transit, or Cloudflare challenge pages, that long-lived WebSocket gets killed easily — and you end up staring at Reconnecting... 1/5 over and over. Turn off WebSocket and switch to plain HTTP streaming requests, and the problem mostly disappears. Comparison of the four fixes Why WebSocket Breaks Behind Proxies # The WebSocket protocol starts with an HTTP Upgrade request; only after the server returns 101 does it switch to the long-lived connection. That long-lived connection is exactly where the problem sits — proxy servers, firewalls, and CDN nodes all run timeout policies on idle connections, and Cloudflare’s challenge mechanism can inject an interstitial page mid-path. Any link in that chain kills the connection, and the Codex client starts Reconnecting.

Update note: This post is based on the Codex App as of May 2026. SSH Remote is still in alpha, and the configuration methods and UI entry points may change with new releases. If anything here has gone stale, refer to the official documentation for the latest. The Codex App now supports connecting to remote machines over SSH; the feature is currently in alpha. If you develop on remote servers, train models, or run environments there, this is worth a try. It lets you connect to a remote server directly inside Codex and work in the remote filesystem and shell — no more jumping back and forth between a local terminal, VSCode Remote, SSH, and tmux.