Working footer can show stale active work state

What version of Codex CLI is running?

codex-cli 0.118.0

What subscription do you have?

plus

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.3 high

What platform is your computer?

macOS 26.3 arm64

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

iTerm2

What issue are you seeing?

The footer appeared to show an active job that had been running for more than 12 hours.

<img width="1744" height="177" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/752b5f0d-5405-4ed3-a72d-ed22336e6fd8" />

What I saw:

• Working (12h 24m 04s · esc to interrupt)
• 10 background terminals running
• pressing Esc did interrupt that state

What made this confusing:

• it looked like there was still real active work running
• later I checked the local transcript for that turn and could not find a matching long-running command

Because of that, I suspect stale or background execution state may be getting surfaced as current interruptible work in the footer.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

I do not have a reliable repro yet.

This happened during a session where older background terminals or exec sessions had existed.

What I observed was:

1. The footer showed Working (12h 24m 04s · esc to interrupt).
2. It also showed 10 background terminals running.
3. Pressing Esc did interrupt that state.
4. Later, I checked the local transcript for that turn and could not find a matching long-running command.

So I have a concrete observed case, but not a stable step-by-step repro yet.

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

_No response_