ACP-spawned sessions don't appear in the Codex desktop app

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Apr 1, 2026 by fschrhunt Closed Apr 1, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

Description

When Codex CLI is invoked through the ACP (Agent Client Protocol) adapter — for example via OpenClaw or other orchestration tools using codex-acp — the resulting sessions are not visible in the Codex desktop app's session list.

Expected behavior

Sessions created via codex-acp (the ACP adapter) should appear in the Codex app alongside natively-created sessions, so users have a unified view of all Codex work regardless of how it was initiated.

Current behavior

Sessions created through the Codex app UI → visible in the app ✅
Sessions created via codex-acp / ACP adapter → stored in ~/.codex/sessions/ as JSONL but not visible in the Codex app ❌

The Codex app appears to read session state from ~/.codex/state_5.sqlite, while ACP-spawned sessions write to the JSONL session files + session_index.jsonl. The two storage paths don't sync.

Reproduction

Run a Codex task via ACP: acpx codex exec "hello world"
Open the Codex desktop app
The session from step 1 does not appear in the session list

Environment

Codex CLI: latest (via npm)
codex-acp: ^0.9.5
macOS arm64
OpenClaw orchestration layer

Suggestion

Either have the ACP adapter write to the same SQLite state store the app uses, or have the app also read from session_index.jsonl / the JSONL session files.

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Submitted by Hunt Marketing (via AI assistant)

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

etraut-openai contributor · 4 months ago

This behavior is intentional, so we wouldn't consider this a bug. Sessions created by exec or codex_mcp are tagged as separate from those that are created by interactive clients like the TUI, IDE extension, and Codex app.

fschrhunt · 4 months ago

Appreciate the clarification — makes sense that they're tagged differently given the different execution contexts.

That said, from a user experience perspective, it would be really valuable to have visibility into ACP-spawned sessions from within the Codex app. When you're orchestrating multiple agents and Codex is handling coding tasks in the background, being able to review those sessions alongside your interactive ones in one place would make the workflow significantly smoother.

Even if it's behind a toggle or a filter (e.g. "Show all sessions" vs "Interactive only"), having the option to surface ACP/exec sessions in the app would be a great quality-of-life improvement. Right now the only way to review them is through the CLI, which adds friction when you're already in the app.

Would love to see this considered as a feature request if not a bug fix. Thanks for the quick response either way.

etraut-openai contributor · 4 months ago

Please open a new feature request so it's phrased as such. We prioritize feature requests based on community feedback (upvotes), so make the title and description compelling so others upvote it.