codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Codex Desktop session can become unusable after large Git output

Summary

After the Codex Desktop app update today (2026-05-16), sessions can become unreadable / crash the app UI after output-heavy Git management. The underlying repo and CLI remain fine, but the Desktop session transcript appears to become too large or otherwise unrenderable.

Environment

• OS: Windows
• App: Codex Desktop app, updated today (2026-05-16)
• CLI available on the same machine: codex-cli 0.130.0
• Repo state after the incident was clean and pushed successfully, so this does not appear to be a Git failure.

What happened

I hit this twice today while managing a repository from the Desktop app:

1. A session crashed/rendered a generic error after Git-related desktop transcript content was present. I was able to recover locally by backing up and sanitizing the JSONL transcript, then verifying it was valid UTF-8 / parseable JSONL again.
2. A fresh session later broke again after normal but very large Git output: a cleanup involving multiple commits, hundreds of rename lines from git commit, plus long git status / diff / stat style output.

In the second case, there was no repo corruption and no failed push. The visible failure was the Desktop app session display/transcript handling. The UI showed the generic Chinese error message equivalent to "Oops, something went wrong" (??????).

Reproduction shape

This is the pattern that seems to trigger it:

1. Open Codex Desktop on Windows after today's update.
2. Work in a local Git repo with many file moves / renames.
3. Let the agent run output-heavy Git commands, for example:
   • git commit without quiet mode when the commit has hundreds of renames
   • full git status on a large worktree
   • full git diff or large git show --stat
4. Continue the session or reload it.
5. The Desktop session becomes extremely fragile or fails to render with a generic app error, even though Git itself and Codex CLI still work.

Expected behavior

The Desktop app should keep the session readable and recoverable even when tool output is very large. Ideally it would truncate, summarize, lazy-load, or virtualize large command output, and avoid letting a single output-heavy Git workflow poison the whole session transcript.

Actual behavior

The Desktop app session can become unusable after large Git output. Opening/continuing the thread can fail with a generic UI error. The only practical workaround was to abandon the thread or manually repair/sanitize transcript files.

Workaround I am using

For now I am avoiding high-volume Git output in the Desktop app:

• Use git commit -q.
• Avoid full git status, full git diff, and full rename lists.
• Use counts only, e.g. git status --short | Measure-Object.
• Limit stats, e.g. git show --stat --stat-count=20 --oneline HEAD.
• Aggregate file lists by directory instead of printing hundreds of paths.

This workaround helps, but it is easy for an agent session to accidentally print too much, and after today's update the failure is very disruptive.