The --full-auto Flag Is Deprecated

The mistake

Wiring a new CI job or automation script around codex exec --full-auto, usually because that's the flag in an older tutorial, a colleague's script from a while back, or a Stack Overflow answer that hasn't been revisited since it was written.

Why this happens

The flag hasn't been pulled — it still runs, and the CLI still does what it always did with it — which is exactly why the mistake persists. A deprecated flag that still works produces no immediate signal that anything is wrong. The only sign is a warning printed alongside normal output, which is trivial to miss in a CI log that nobody reads unless a job actually fails, and easy to filter out entirely if your pipeline only surfaces stderr on non-zero exit.

Why it matters

A flag that's deprecated but not yet removed is exactly the kind of thing that gets removed later without much notice, on the CLI's own release schedule rather than yours — and an unattended pipeline is the worst place to discover that, because nobody's watching interactively when it happens. There's also a smaller, more immediate cost: the warning text is noise in build logs that are supposed to be clean, and it makes it harder to trust that a clean-looking log is actually clean.

The fix

Replace --full-auto with the current explicit form, which spells out the sandbox mode directly rather than bundling it behind a shorthand name. If your pipeline needs specific approval behaviour alongside that sandbox setting — for instance, never prompting at all in a non-interactive run — pair it with the matching --ask-for-approval value rather than relying on a single flag to imply both. Grep any existing automation for the old flag name once; it's a small, mechanical fix, and it's much cheaper to make deliberately than to discover after the flag actually disappears.

A useful habit once you've made the swap: treat any command line copied from an old README, blog post or internal wiki page as suspect by default, not just this one flag. Codex's own CLI surface has moved fast enough that a command that was current a year ago is a reasonable place to expect exactly this kind of quiet rename, and checking codex exec --help against what a script actually invokes takes seconds compared to debugging a pipeline that broke on a release nobody read the notes for.

See also

The sandbox modes reference lays out every current invocation, including the read-only and CI-appropriate presets that a script previously relying on --full-auto probably wants instead.