codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Disappearing chat history (sentences or paragraphs randomly vanishing) [2 comments, 2 participants]

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

codex-cli 0.126.0-alpha.13

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Linux 6.6.87.2-microsoft-standard-WSL2

What issue are you seeing?

Basically every session, as new prompts are sent and they flow through, chat history starts disappearing. It disappears in chunks, usually pieces (sentences or paragraphs) of a previous reply or input prompt.

This behavior is incredibly annoying when I'm trying to remember things that have happened, gather historical context, or if I'm in the middle of reading a previous prompt reply while other work is being completed.

I assume this is some form of adaptive compaction/compression that OpenAI does - it's a smart idea if that's the case - however it could be implemented in a way that doesn't affect the user but still works. If you split the actual source of context from the users historical context, we can keep all of the messages without losing the compressed context to be fed back into the LLM on subsequent messages.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Just use Codex

What is the expected behavior?

Text shouldn't disappear randomly from view.

Additional information

Like I mentioned above, this is likely an adaptive compression/compaction technique OpenAI uses to preserve chat context - it's a smart idea. But the user experience is terrible. The streams should be split:

• One stream for the users actual visual history in the Codex CLI. This can be what's displayed to users (the chat history), and does not include any live deletions.
• The compacted version, stored in a separate stream behind the scenes. This can be the source of truth for the Codex CLI for use as context.

This way, it does not affect the user experience, but still benefits from the compaction.

And with all that being said, if it is not actually some compaction technique... Well then this is a bug that I've been experiencing since I've started using Codex, and I'm sure everyone else is experiencing too.