My experience using it from cursor has been fairly disappointing

Much better in the codex cli harness

There's one really confusing thing in Codex CLI from my perspective. How do I make it run unsandboxed but still ask me for approvals? I'm fine with it running bare on my machine but I like to approve first before it runs commands. But I only see how I can configure to have both or none. What am I missing?

Interesting, I can give that a try at some point.

In what way(s), if you can elaborate?

Claude 4.5 or 4.6 just one shots what I ask instead of getting stuck in random tangents.