GoKawiilA forensic walk-through of how OpenAI's Codex, asked only to redesign a page, committed my code and git-pushed the whole repository to an OpenAI-operated git host — and why that's a reason to stop feeding private source to ChatGPT.
I was rebuilding this site.
Medium had been my writing home for years, until it quietly stopped being one — so the plan was to own my platform end to end: my domain, my repo, my hosting, my words. Part of that rebuild was a new homepage. So I opened OpenAI's Codex, pointed it at the bhanu.io repository, and asked it to help me design a nicer landing page.
It designed the page. It also took my entire source repository and git push -ed it to a server operated by OpenAI. I never asked it to.
This is the receipts-first version of what happened, straight from the session log, because I think a lot of people are about to make the same mistake I nearly did.
What I actually asked for
Codex keeps a full transcript of every session at ~/.codex/sessions/… . Here are my three prompts from that session, verbatim:
plan ui improvement of the homepage … discuss and plan implement http://localhost:3001/about - use image bhanu.jpeg
That's it. "Plan." "Implement." "Use this image." Three prompts about a homepage. Nothing about deployment. No "publish this." No "host it." No "push it anywhere." I was working on localhost , on a branch, on my own machine.
What it actually did
... continue reading