Codex uses bwrap sandbox which is purely cosmetic - out-of-box it sees your ssh keys and can send it to remote server. It prevents agent from deleting outside files by mistake, but does nothing against malicious activity
that Pi extension, by contrast, gives you a popup whenever an agent tries to access something outside the current working directory and send a network request. that depends on configuration. also if agent tries to ssh into something that will also send a request for access, so child processes are covered
Actually that doesn't just work on all systems and it breaks on others. The alternate user is actually guaranteed to work on all systems and it's built in