Codex asks me to approve every single command, even ls and npm test

Asking in the chat does nothing, because approvals are not up to the model. They are a setting of the CLI itself.

For normal work inside one project, start it like this:

codex --full-auto

That lets it read, edit and run commands inside your project folder without asking, and it only stops when it wants to do something outside the sandbox. To make it the default, put it in ~/.codex/config.toml:

approval_policy = "on-request"
sandbox_mode = "workspace-write"

What I would not do is switch the sandbox off completely to get rid of the prompts. The prompts are annoying, but a model with full disk access and no questions is how people lose a folder.