‘Never Talk About Goblins’: OpenAI’s Instructions to Codex Have a Weirdly Emphatic No-Creatures Policy

A document posted by OpenAI on Github as part of the open-sourcing for Codex CLI, OpenAI’s most recent flagship coding agent, contains what looks like the entire system prompt for GPT-5.5 in a coding context. And it seems to correct for the model’s past addiction to talking about whimsical creatures both natural and supernatural.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"92b7b46b-43ed-4e0e-b21b-2c999302d9d7","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.gizmodo.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"2000751984","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"tech","SECTION":"artificial-intelligence","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"artificial-intelligence","TAGS":"codex,goblin,openai","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); Here’s the relevant section…

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