Bug: Agent resume crashes: "Permission overrides are not supported when resuming a remote task"

[mjaggard]

Summary

An agent (Pam Codex, running in this office's fleet) crashed on startup/resume with:

Error: Permission overrides are not supported when resuming a remote task.

─ process exited (code 1) ─

The crash happened mid-way through the agent processing a routine hive inbox-drain instruction, cut off partway through referencing inbox message IDs (visible in the truncated draft below), suggesting it died while resuming from a prior remote task state.

What was in flight when it crashed

The agent's unsent draft output ended with:

...Z-6f538c, 2026-09-29T09-56-08-021Z-91737f. Read your inbox, act on what is pending there, and move handled ones to inbox/.done/. Your inbox directory is authoritative: work everything still pending in it, and if a named id is already in inbox/.done/ you handled it on an earlier turn and can ignore that one. Act autonomously; only message god if you genuinely need a decision.

Error: Permission overrides are not supported when resuming a remote task.

─ process exited (code 1) ─

Impact

The agent (pam-mt1a757c) disappeared entirely from the fleet roster after this - it is no longer listed as an active agent at all, rather than surfacing as crashed/errored and recoverable. Work it had been assigned is now effectively orphaned until it's respawned.

Expected behaviour

Either:

• Resuming a remote task should not require/pass permission overrides that trigger this rejection, or
• If overrides genuinely can't apply on resume, the failure should be handled gracefully (drop the overrides with a warning, or surface a clear "agent crashed, needs restart" state) rather than a hard process exit that silently removes the agent from the roster.

Environment

• Munder Difflin v0.5.4 (packaged app, /Applications/Munder Difflin.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar)
• macOS (Darwin 25.6.0)

[mjaggard]

In that release I was able to work around it by editing the command line. That also fails in the new version.

Error: Permission overrides are not supported when resuming a remote task.

[mjaggard]

Opened PR #705: #705

The managed Codex launch path automatically adds --remote, including when restarting an agent with Auto Mode permission overrides. Codex rejects those overrides on remote resume. The hive also injects --add-dir, which Codex rejects with --remote even on a fresh launch.

The PR chooses a compatible transport before daemon setup:

• Resume/fork with permission overrides uses local --no-daemon, retaining the original session ID, prompt and permissions.
• Sandboxed launches needing additional writable directories also run locally with those directory grants intact.
• Compatible launches retain managed remote access. Fresh launches with explicit full sandbox bypass can omit redundant directory grants and use remote access.
• Explicitly selected remote/local transports are honoured.

Validation: 50 relevant tests, full typecheck and production build passed. The full test suite completed with explicit timeouts: 969 passed, 1 skipped, and 1 failed due to the existing shipped/baked model-catalogue mismatch. The failing test and its input files are unchanged from origin/main. Before/after launch-regression captures are attached to the PR, and its evidence check passes. A Codex 0.160.1 CLI check with local resume plus Auto Mode/hive options reached session lookup for a deliberately nonexistent ID, without rejecting permission overrides; no model turn was run. Existing-session resume and mobile visibility still need end-to-end validation.

Default sandboxed hive launches consequently lack mobile remote access until server-side writable-root support is implemented. The separate report that the agent disappeared from the roster remains unverified; this PR addresses the launch failure and does not change roster lifecycle handling, so I am leaving this issue open.

[Dhruvil-Sharma]

I hit the same failure on Munder Difflin v0.5.5 (Linux packaged app) with Codex 0.160.1. On app start, both existing Codex agents exited with code 1 and the same “Permission overrides are not supported when resuming a remote task” error. They were automatically resumed, so please keep resume automatic and invoke Codex resume without unsupported permission overrides (preserving the existing remote session permissions).\n\nThere was also an interactive “Hooks need review — 8 hooks are new or changed” prompt during startup. For unattended resume, startup should not block on a hook review prompt; it should honor the configured hook trust policy non-interactively and keep untrusted hooks from running until trusted. The desired behavior is automatic session resume without asking me to review hook changes.