codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Codex Desktop session list appears to drop existing local transcripts after index rebuild/filtering

Summary

Codex Desktop showed many older working sessions as missing even though the underlying local transcript files still existed on disk.

This looks like a session index / sidebar visibility issue rather than transcript deletion.

Observed behavior

• The Desktop session sidebar appeared to lose a large number of older sessions.
• Local transcript files were still present in the normal Codex sessions directory.
• The visible session index contained substantially fewer entries than the transcript files on disk.

Local evidence, sanitized

I intentionally am not including any session titles, prompts, transcript contents, usernames, project names, or full filesystem paths.

On one affected machine:

• Local transcript files found: 461 JSONL files total across active and archived session storage.
• Normal session transcript files: 448.
• Archived session transcript files: 13.
• Visible session index entries: 245 JSONL lines, representing 237 unique IDs.
• Transcript files not represented in the visible session index: 224.
• Of the normal session transcript files missing from the index: 223.
• Most missing normal transcript files appeared to be internal approval-reviewer / guardian-subagent runs rather than user-facing working sessions:
  • 217 / 223 missing normal transcript files contained approval-reviewer / guardian policy markers.
  • About 6 unindexed files looked more like real work or subagent investigation sessions.

The session index rows had this shape:

{"id":"...","thread_name":"...","updated_at":"..."}

The missing transcript files themselves were valid JSONL transcripts and included session_meta; they did not appear corrupt.

Expected behavior

One of these should be true:

1. User-facing working sessions that still have valid local transcript files should remain visible in the Desktop session list, or
2. Internal approval-reviewer / subagent transcripts should be consistently excluded and never appear as normal working sessions, or
3. If the app intentionally hides/archive-filters old or internal sessions, the UI should make that state clear and avoid making it look like sessions were randomly deleted.

Why this is confusing

From the user's perspective, older sessions seemed to disappear randomly. The data was still present locally, but the UI/index no longer surfaced many entries. Because most of the missing transcripts look like internal approval-reviewer runs, this may be a cleanup or filtering behavior, but there were also a few apparent non-reviewer sessions missing from the index.

Suggested fix

• Audit how session_index.jsonl is rebuilt or filtered.
• Ensure internal reviewer/subagent sessions are either never shown or clearly classified separately.
• Ensure valid user-facing transcript files are not omitted from the visible index during migration/backfill.
• Consider a repair/backfill command that can rebuild the visible session index from local transcript files without exposing internal reviewer sessions as normal user sessions.

Environment

• Codex Desktop on macOS.
• Affected transcripts span multiple recent Codex Desktop alpha versions, including 0.129.0-alpha.15, 0.130.0-alpha.5, 0.131.0-alpha.9, and 0.133.0-alpha.1.

Happy to provide more aggregate diagnostics if useful, but I would prefer not to share raw transcript contents because they may contain personal or sensitive session data.