codex - 💡(How to fix) Fix Windows Desktop: visible projects in sidebar are no longer sorted by recency or alphabetically after update [1 comments, 2 participants]

What version of the Codex App are you using?

Observed from the running Windows desktop process:

• Codex Desktop package path: OpenAI.Codex_26.513.4821.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0
• Codex.exe ProductVersion: 26.513.40821
• Codex.exe FileVersion: 2886
• bundled/runtime codex.exe: 0.131.0-alpha.9

What subscription do you have?

Not included in this report.

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11 x64.

Local version details:

• Windows release: 25H2
• Build: 26200.8457
• Note: the legacy Windows registry ProductName field reports Windows 10 Education on this machine, but the user confirms this is Windows 11; the build number is the useful signal.

What issue are you seeing?

After a Codex Desktop update roughly a week ago, the top-level project list in the left sidebar is no longer ordered in any recognizable way.

This is not the same symptom as older chats being hidden, projects showing No chats, or the known recent-window/sidebar-history issues. The project entries are visible, but their order appears scrambled.

Previously, projects appeared with the newest / most recently active project first, top-down. Now the visible projects are not sorted by:

• recency / last activity
• project name alphabetically
• creation order, as far as the user can tell

The order appears arbitrary and makes the project sidebar harder to scan, because recently used projects are no longer predictably near the top.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

A precise clean-room repro is not available yet, but the observed flow is:

1. Use Codex Desktop on Windows with multiple projects in the left sidebar.
2. Update/restart Codex Desktop after a recent update.
3. Open the project sidebar.
4. Observe that top-level project entries are visible, but no longer appear newest-first.
5. Compare the visible order against project names and recent activity; it is neither chronological nor alphabetical.

What is the expected behavior?

The project list should have a stable, understandable ordering.

At minimum, it should preserve the previous behavior: newest / most recently active project first, descending. If a different ordering is intentional, the UI should expose or document it clearly.

What actually happened?

The top-level project list appears in an arbitrary/scrambled order after the update. Visible projects are not hidden, but they are no longer ordered by recency or alphabetically.

Why this seems distinct from existing sidebar history bugs

There are several existing reports about missing or hidden project conversations, recent-window limits, and sidebar search not finding old threads. This report is narrower: it is about the ordering of visible top-level projects.

Related but different reports include:

• #21128: Codex Desktop silently hides project conversations outside the global recent-50 window
• #20254: Windows Codex Desktop sidebar hides valid local project threads while SQLite and rollout files are intact
• #17540: Windows app: older local threads disappear from sidebar and sidebar search after restart while still present on disk
• #19290: Windows Desktop sidebar shows No chats and no projects after update, but Search can still find/open existing chats

Those may share underlying sidebar/list-model code, but this issue is specifically about visible projects being unordered rather than hidden.