There aren't any documented settings to disable this, but there is a feature flag it currently sits behind. You can flip it in your ~/.codex/config.toml[1]:

  [features]
  daemon_auto_start = false

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1: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/0c329ad2c9d5a2592128a1d...

Yes this should be turned off by default. The daemon is useful when building apps on top of the daemon server, e.g. pi or pi-durable custom harnesses.

For whatever reason, the daemon has been refusing to start and Codex has been grumbling to me. I was wondering where the daemon had come from, and thought maybe I missed something previously and that it had just broken.

Yep, the real issue is that it was something they didn’t have before, and then with Codex 0.157.0 enabled, they installed this persistent nonsense [1] that survives after the last instance of Codex has exited on your machine, which is just gross.

  codex features disable daemon_auto_start
  codex app-server daemon stop
  pkill -f 'app-server daemon pid-update-loop'