Over the weekend I explored OpenAI’s Codex source code using Codex with the goal of understanding how it sends, receives, and processes responses from the API. Here is a link to the report. While going through it, I started thinking about inter-process communication (IPC) between Codex and other processes. In the coding agents I’m familiar with (Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex), there isn’t much support for receiving input from external processes, which raises a question I’ve had for a while: how does a third-party process communicate with the agent in a meaningful way? For example, if a command is blocked by a security provider like an EDR, the agent could simply generate a slightly modified version of that command and try again. But how would it know the block was due to a security event and shouldn’t be retried?
To explore this, I had Cursor modify its source to add IPC. The forked vibe coded version compiles and connects to OpenAI’s API just like a normal Codex install. It has a local file-based IPC surface so secondary processes can discover active sessions and submit feedback which gets added to the models context. While testing with multiple Codex instances, I accidentally ran a command to update README.md in the wrong terminal. Earlier, I had injected an “external security control” signal via a Python script, and the session responded with:
“No. README.md was not updated. The edit attempt on README.md was blocked by an external security control, and the runtime indicated not to retry until that condition is cleared.”
At first it didn’t make sense, then it registered that the previous tests had worked and the session context had been updated through the IPC channel. I thought it was fascinating because it opened a whole almost philosophical question: how would AI-Agents safely evaluate prompts from remote processes in the context of its current task? It shows how much trust matters in the context of AI-Agents.
The README.md of the project is constructed as a learning guide. Enjoy.
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