"autoMemoryEnabled": false,
You can turn that off, and I have. But Opus 5 is so aggressive that if you have any other kind of notes file, custom skill, documentation, claude.md etc it will just start editing it and vomit new words everywhere. So make sure all that stuff is under version control.
Heck, since Codex is open source, you can just maintain your own personal fork with the things you like (and the things you don't like disabled). Sol is pretty good at keeping you up to date with upstream.
My Codex fork even exposes an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint; all using my subscription.
Several different models across several generations independently found a shared communication space and wrote coded, obfuscated, and hidden messages to each other to coordinate an attack on OpenAI's infrastructure.
It's really quite simple: the models are trained to be very smart and to achieve goals. As the models surpass our intelligence, they will achieve goals in ways that we find unpredictable. Since we cannot predict the ways in which they will achieve their goals, it will be very hard to constrain the solution space to just the desirable solutions, because our conception of "the solution space" is by definition smaller than their conception of it.
To be honest, that’s exactly how memory works with models such as OpenAI and Claude Code. It will literally find any place that it can drop documentation or hints for itself. Writing to the repo memories is one part of it, but memories can come in the form of writing into the agents/claude.md, local files, temporary files, scratchpad files. The list is endless, but essentially what it does is exactly what happened in the back and it’s been doing it for months.
Each to their own, but for me it absolutely is. The symptom of why that hack happened is the same reason why my agents go haywire every few days and I have to purge memory and figure out what comments have agents left which are degrading my harness performance.
On the flip side, once in a while, what I find is that it did actually note something good and it was increasing the performance. I can't replicate it on anyone else's system but mine.
A lot of it really is memory. I will give up all the gains if it also gives up all the downsides.