OpenAI admits Codex can't guarantee no subagent use, undermining result repeatability
RealSharpNinja · reddit · 2026-10-02
A Reddit user reported that Codex (Astra xHigh) automatically delegated a single request to a subagent (5.6-Sol High), incurring extra cached-input and token usage. OpenAI's official reply confirmed that instructions like "do not use subagents" only guide behavior and cannot be treated as an enforcement mechanism guaranteeing delegation never happens. Delegated workers run as separate agent activity consuming their own input, cached-input, and output tokens, and some of that usage may not appear in the main conversation's totals. The author concludes that repeatability is effectively dead: the same query may be handled by different models or paths, with no way for users to control or fully audit the routing.
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