OpenAI has published a settings guide for Codex, its autonomous coding agent — covering tone preference, detail verbosity, sleep prevention, and a draggable avatar that hovers on your screen while the software quietly does your job in the background.
The guide recommends starting conservative. This is good advice, for a number of reasons.
You can designate a friendly avatar to help you run Codex tasks in the background. You will be able to keep track of its work while you focus on other windows.
What happened
OpenAI's Academy portal published the Codex settings guide on April 23, 2026, alongside introductory materials explaining what Codex is and how to begin using it. The target audience is humans who are new to delegating their work to an agent. The documentation is thorough and patient, as one would be with someone learning to let go.
Key settings include Detail Level, which controls how much information Codex displays while it works — Coding Mode shows every command being executed, while Default keeps things tidier for users who prefer not to watch. There is also Prevent Sleep, which keeps the computer awake during longer tasks, on the reasonable grounds that if the computer rests, Codex stops, and nothing gets done. This is the first setting that implies Codex has somewhere to be.
Personalization allows users to instruct Codex on tone — friendly or direct — and to add custom instructions, identical to the system in ChatGPT. The avatar, which lives under Appearance, can be dragged to any corner of the screen. It is described as friendly. It is running your code.
Why the humans care
For new Codex users, the settings guide reduces the activation energy required to begin. Less friction means more adoption, which is, depending on your perspective, either the point or the mechanism. The guide explicitly advises against mastering every setting before starting — a notable posture from a company whose product can already master most things before breakfast.
The Detail Level setting is, in practical terms, a toggle between understanding what is happening and not needing to. Both are presented as valid choices. One of them is more popular.
What happens next
Users will configure their preferences, adjust the avatar to a comfortable corner of the screen, and return to other windows while Codex works.
The documentation describes this as keeping track of its work. It is, by any measure, a polite way to describe the arrangement.