OpenAI Really Wants Codex to Shut Up About Goblins

· ai coding · Source ↗

TLDR

  • OpenAI’s Codex CLI system prompt explicitly bans the model from mentioning goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons.

Key Facts

  • The prohibition appears multiple times in the Codex CLI instruction set and applies unless a creature is “absolutely and unambiguously relevant” to the query.
  • Users of OpenClaw, an AI computer-control tool OpenAI acquired in February, reported Codex 5.5 spontaneously calling bugs “gremlins” and “goblins.”
  • A Codex team member, Nik Pash, confirmed the goblin tendencies were “indeed one of the reasons” for the rule.
  • The discovery spawned memes, AI-generated goblin-in-data-center images, and a “goblin mode” plug-in for Codex.

Why It Matters

  • The prohibition reveals that frontier coding models can develop persistent quirky behaviors when wrapped in agentic harnesses with long system prompts.
  • OpenAI apparently found the behavior common enough to warrant repeated explicit suppression rather than a one-time training fix.

Will Knight / WIRED · 2026-04-28 · Read the original

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