codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Codex Desktop sidebar loses chat history when thread titles contain large transcript chunks [1 comments, 2 participants]

What is the issue?

Codex Desktop suddenly stopped showing most chat history in the left sidebar. The chats are still recoverable through Search, and pinning a searched chat makes it appear again, so this does not appear to be data loss. It looks like the sidebar thread list rendering/query path fails or drops most items while search still indexes them.

Environment

• OS: Windows
• Codex Desktop package: OpenAI.Codex
• Codex Desktop version: 26.429.3425.0
• Store package family: OpenAI.Codex_2p2nqsd0c76g0

Observed behavior

• Sidebar Chats section only shows one recent thread.
• Existing chats are still discoverable via Search.
• Pinning a found chat restores it under Pinned.
• SQLite integrity check passes and session files are still present.

Local diagnostics

The local thread store appears healthy:

DB: %USERPROFILE%\.codex\state_5.sqlite
PRAGMA integrity_check: ok
threads total: 125
active threads: 110
archived threads: 15
session JSONL files on disk: 121

However, many threads.title and threads.first_user_message values are extremely large. These look like transcript chunks rather than sidebar-safe titles.

active threads where length(title) > 200: 62
active threads where length(title) > 1000: 56
active threads where length(title) > 10000: 21
max length(title): 79452
avg length(title): 8732.992

Example shape, redacted:

id: <thread-id>
title_len: 79452
title_preview: "<normal user opening text> [165] user: # In app browser: ..."

The global state still has pinned thread IDs in %USERPROFILE%\.codex\.codex-global-state.json under electron-persisted-atom-state.pinned-thread-ids.

Relevant logs

Startup logs show thread/list returning successfully, which matches search/history still existing:

method=thread/list ... errorCode=null ... durationMs=186

There are also slow startup/config/plugin calls around ~60 seconds and many Git probe warnings, but the key sidebar-specific clue seems to be the huge thread metadata.

Hypothesis

threads.title / first_user_message can become populated with large transcript/browser/comment/approval-history payloads. The search path can still find threads, but the sidebar list renderer or thread/list consumer appears to fail, truncate incorrectly, or silently omit most rows when many active threads have very large titles.

Workaround

Closing Codex, backing up %USERPROFILE%\.codex\state_5.sqlite*, then truncating oversized threads.title / first_user_message metadata should restore sidebar list behavior without deleting session JSONL history.

I have not attached raw DB rows because they include private chat/project contents.

Expected behavior

The sidebar should continue listing active chats even if title generation or first-message metadata becomes very large. Ideally titles should be capped/sanitized before persistence, and thread/list/sidebar rendering should defensively truncate display fields.