codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Codex Desktop injects UTC current date despite America/Los_Angeles timezone

Summary

Codex Desktop appears to inject an inconsistent current date into the model context around local evening hours in Pacific time. The shell/macOS clock and the Codex turn context both show the local date as Thursday, June 4, 2026 in America/Los_Angeles, but the higher-level model context told the assistant the current date was Friday, June 5, 2026. This caused the assistant to resolve "tomorrow" incorrectly.

Environment

• App: Codex Desktop for macOS
• App version: 26.601.21317
• Bundle identifier: com.openai.codex
• CLI version from session metadata: 0.136.0-alpha.2
• Workspace: local macOS project
• Timezone: America/Los_Angeles

What happened

During a thread started at local time:

Thu Jun  4 21:23:36 PDT 2026

Codex stored the thread under the local-date path:

~/.codex/sessions/2026/06/04/rollout-2026-06-04T21-10-31-019e95f9-b891-7752-9fc1-cbb130bf26b0.jsonl

The session/turn metadata also correctly recorded:

{
  "timestamp": "2026-06-05T04:10:37.726Z",
  "current_date": "2026-06-04",
  "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles"
}

However, the model received/inferred a higher-level "current date" of Friday, June 5, 2026. When the user said:

put it in my face tomorrow at 8am

the assistant initially resolved "tomorrow" as Saturday, June 6, 2026 instead of Friday, June 5, 2026.

The local shell had no timezone override:

$ date
Thu Jun  4 21:23:36 PDT 2026

$ date -u
Fri Jun  5 04:23:36 UTC 2026

$ date +%Z
PDT

$ date +%z
-0700

No relevant timezone setting was found in:

• ~/.codex/config.toml
• defaults read com.openai.codex
• process environment (TZ was not set)

Expected behavior

If Codex supplies both a current_date and a timezone, they should be internally consistent. At 2026-06-05T04:10Z with America/Los_Angeles, the local current date should be 2026-06-04, not 2026-06-05.

Relative date phrases such as "today", "tomorrow", and "yesterday" should resolve against the local date for the configured timezone, not UTC.

Impact

This affects reminders, automations, calendar-like workflows, ticket reviews, deploy timing, daily reports, and any work where "tomorrow" or "today" matters. It is especially confusing because the Mac clock and shell clock are correct, while the assistant may still act on the wrong day.

Workaround

For now I can ask Codex to run date before any date-sensitive action and trust shell time over injected context, but that is easy to forget and should not be necessary.