Project-based Chat Separation (Isolated Chat Context per Project)

Resolved 💬 9 comments Opened Apr 9, 2026 by patel28 Closed May 10, 2026
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What variant of Codex are you using?

Ide Extension

What feature would you like to see?

Hi OpenAI Team,

I'm using Codex for development across multiple projects (e.g., Android, backend, prompt engineering), and I'm facing frequent issues due to lack of project-based chat separation.

Problem

Currently, all chats exist in a single flat list with no project-level isolation. This makes it very easy to accidentally send messages in the wrong chat while switching between projects.

Since Codex relies heavily on chat context, this leads to incorrect or confusing outputs when context from another project is used unintentionally.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Work on Project A in one chat
  2. Switch to Project B (different task/codebase)
  3. Accidentally continue in Project A chat
  4. Codex uses wrong context → incorrect responses

Impact

  • High risk of mixing contexts between different projects
  • Incorrect code generation and debugging suggestions
  • Reduced productivity and increased mental overhead

Suggested Solution

Introduce project-based chat separation, such as:

  • Ability to create/select a "Project"
  • Chats grouped under each project
  • Context isolated per project
  • Optional: project-level memory or instructions

This would significantly improve developer workflows and reduce context-related errors.

Thanks!

Additional information

_No response_

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9 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 3 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

  • #17182
  • #16145
  • #16967

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etraut-openai contributor · 2 months ago

This feature request hasn't received enough upvotes, so I'm going to close it.

omry · 2 months ago

Here is a vote. just came for it.
Please reopen. operating on multiple projects at the same time is very confusing because the all the chats are mixed up.
For my use case, I am specifically getting bit by vscode codex plugin. Not sure if this is the same surface here, but its the same issue.

hipoglucido · 2 months ago

Implementing this feature would be great actually

omry · 2 months ago

Product direction suggestion:

  1. If not already there, associate project name or directory with each chat thread. At minimum this is the vs code project (what directory we opened vscode on. Even better if it also includes the actual sub-project, in case a single window contains multiple projects.
  1. in the UI:

group chats by project.
if there is only one project, do not show presentation.
If there are 2 or more, visually separate and group chats per project.
We can put the chats of the current active project at the top and have the chats for other projects folded below to prevent confusion. maybe even hide them completely.

@etraut-openai
I am willing to give it a shot and send a PR if there is support for this from the team.

alexeyqu · 2 months ago

+1 -- as someone who is switching from Cursor to Codex/VSCode, this is the feature I miss the most.
It is very useful to see chats related to a particular project when coming back to it after a few days of a different context.

whatsupbros · 1 month ago

Codex CLI already has this isolation functionality by working directory, which is always on by default. To see all chats, there's codex resume --all option, and if you choose a thread from a different directory, it even asks if it should switch the working directory of the thread to the current one.

This means that this isolation logic is already there and is only needed to.be integrated into VS Code extension. The concept of working directory exists in VS Code and can be reused here as well.

daxliniere · 1 month ago

Yes, agree this is a very useful thing. When I'm working on an Arduino project, I don't need to see web development threads.

etraut-openai contributor · 1 month ago

This issue has been closed because it didn't receive enough upvotes. If you'd like to see a similar feature, please create a new feature request with a new title and description.