codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Codex Desktop intermittently crashes/resets on macOS with auth_elicitation feature mismatch and unknown conversation state

Summary

Codex Desktop on macOS is intermittently crashing / disappearing and sometimes appears to reset windows or conversations. I do not see a fresh macOS .ips crash report or Crashpad dump, but the Codex desktop logs repeatedly show an app-server / renderer state mismatch:

• unsupported feature enablement auth_elicitation
• Received turn/started for unknown conversation
• Received turn/completed for unknown conversation
• Item not found in turn state

The issue persisted after reinstalling Codex via Homebrew and rotating a very large ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite file.

Environment

• Product: Codex Desktop
• Codex Desktop app bundle: com.openai.codex
• Codex Desktop app version: 26.513.31313
• App bundle version: 2867
• CLI version after reinstall: codex-cli 0.130.0
• Install/update path used during troubleshooting: brew reinstall codex
• OS: macOS 26.5 build 25F71
• Arch: arm64
• RAM: 8 GB
• Date observed: 2026-05-20

What I tried

1. Quit Codex.
2. Rotated ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite, which had grown to roughly 789M.
3. Removed ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite-shm and ~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite-wal.
4. Reinstalled Codex:

brew reinstall codex

Homebrew reported:

Cask codex (0.130.0) verified
codex was successfully installed

After reopening and using Codex, the app still intermittently crashed / reset. A newly-created log DB had already grown again:

~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite      96M
~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite-wal  45M

Expected behavior

Codex Desktop should remain open and should keep conversation / turn state consistent across active windows and turns.

Actual behavior

The app intermittently crashes / disappears / resets, without a fresh macOS diagnostic crash report. Logs show repeated app-server protocol/state mismatch errors.

Log evidence

No fresh Codex .ips crash report was found under ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports; the only recent entry there was unrelated (node-2026-05-18-203256.ips). Crashpad only contained settings.dat.

After reinstalling, Codex logs still show this feature enablement mismatch on startup:

2026-05-20T15:54:50.814Z error [electron-message-handler] Request failed conversationId=none durationMs=311 error={"code":-32600,"message":"unsupported feature enablement `auth_elicitation`: currently supported features are apps, memories, mentions_v2, plugins, remote_control, tool_search, tool_suggest, tool_call_mcp_elicitation"} method=experimentalFeature/enablement/set
2026-05-20T15:54:50.814Z error [electron-message-handler] Failed to sync experimental feature enablement error={"code":-32600,"message":"unsupported feature enablement `auth_elicitation`: currently supported features are apps, memories, mentions_v2, plugins, remote_control, tool_search, tool_suggest, tool_call_mcp_elicitation"} hostId=local

The same pattern recurs after reopening:

2026-05-20T15:56:07.046Z error [electron-message-handler] Request failed conversationId=none durationMs=296 error={"code":-32600,"message":"unsupported feature enablement `auth_elicitation`: currently supported features are apps, memories, mentions_v2, plugins, remote_control, tool_search, tool_suggest, tool_call_mcp_elicitation"} method=experimentalFeature/enablement/set
2026-05-20T15:56:07.047Z error [electron-message-handler] Failed to sync experimental feature enablement error={"code":-32600,"message":"unsupported feature enablement `auth_elicitation`: currently supported features are apps, memories, mentions_v2, plugins, remote_control, tool_search, tool_suggest, tool_call_mcp_elicitation"} hostId=local

Conversation state also desynchronizes:

2026-05-20T15:56:15.345Z error [electron-message-handler] Received turn/started for unknown conversation conversationId=019e461a-1532-7af0-af25-ac56d8aecbd0
2026-05-20T15:51:28.801Z error [electron-message-handler] Received turn/completed for unknown conversation conversationId=019e4615-8d92-71c3-8022-f8b84276e4f4

During active use, logs continue to show lost turn items:

2026-05-20T16:20:23.928Z error [electron-message-handler] Item not found in turn state itemId=call_dr6y9v0b0w3sKwLe2SKVcVzV
2026-05-20T16:21:54.662Z info [electron-fetch-handler] codex-home request hostId=undefined ...
2026-05-20T16:22:11.471Z error [electron-message-handler] Item not found in turn state itemId=call_Tquj2g4Mo95JjZ1vZOxd8QfO

I also observed multiple Codex helper / renderer / app-server processes after reopen. That may be expected with several windows/sessions, but it coincided with high CPU and the above state errors.

Related issues

This looks related to, but not exactly the same as:

• #21167, which reports turn/started for unknown conversation reconnect loops.
• #19534, where stale ~/.codex/.codex-global-state.json can poison the desktop app across reinstalls.
• #21663, another macOS crash report involving local session state.

Notes

This may be a persisted-state compatibility problem between the Desktop frontend and the bundled app-server. The auth_elicitation feature appears to be requested by the Desktop side but rejected by the current app-server feature list.