OpenAI is racing to fix a logging flaw in its Codex coding agent that has been silently writing as much as 640TB a year to users' SSDs, enough to exhaust a budget drive's rated endurance in under twelve months.
The bug, filed as issue #28224 by Apache Flink committer Rui Fan, traces to Codex's SQLite diagnostic logs running as a constant background writer. Fan measured 37TB written in 21 days of uptime. Asked to cost its own damage, Codex estimated the regression "plausibly burned low-single-digit millions of dollars of SSD endurance across users" between March and June.
It is a tidy illustration of agent economics: the cost was not the tokens but the disk the agent quietly chewed through while logging.