codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Resuscitate stopped agent trees after provider disconnects or quota exhaustion [2 comments, 2 participants]

What variant of Codex are you using?

App

What feature would you like to see?

Codex should provide a way to recover an agent/subagent tree after transient infrastructure failures such as network loss (hence failure to connect to OpenAI), or quota exhaustion.

Requested behavior:

• Persist parent-child agent tree state durably.
• Preserve each agent's task, last status, and failure/interruption reason.
• Distinguish quota exhaustion, transport failure, timeout, user interruption, and normal completion.
• Provide a user-visible command/action to resume a stopped tree (or multiple trees, handy when working in multiple projects at the same time).
• Optionally auto-resume eligible agents after connectivity returns or quota resets.
• Avoid resuming agents that completed normally, were explicitly cancelled, or require user approval.

This is broader than ordinary session resume: the goal is recursive recovery of the active multi-agent work tree.

Additional information

Current possible workarounds

Currently, a possible workaround is to manually text each agent to ask it to wake up its subagents (asking is necessary, since otherwise it's not possible to derive the state, check https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/16900#issuecomment-4412656517), ask them to resume their work if they suffered from this sort of issues (disconnections/quota exhaustion), to this for their subagents of their own (if applicable) as well, and that this message should be recursively propagated down the agent tree.

This could be packaged into a skill, and then it's a matter of calling the skill in each of the top sessions that were running. But of course, this is likely more frail than a built-in Codex feature for this.